With the Summer Academy, the Vienna Philharmonic has built up its own pool of young talent. Young musicians apply, sometimes via video. Around 70 of them are selected to rehearse for several weeks parallel to the Salzburg Festival, supervised by members of Vienna’s top orchestra. A unique chance in life – “What we learn in the process remains a mystery, but it also has something to do with intonation and phrasing,” says a young musician at the opening of the concert at Young Euro Classic. It is the first trip abroad for the summer academy ever.

You can hear in the Konzerthaus from the very first few seconds, namely with the cellos in Zoltán Kodály’s “Tänzen aus Galánta”, that the work with the Vienna Philharmonic is clearly bearing rich fruit. The sound conducted by Tomás Hanus is sharp and precise, vital and so highly concentrated in the detailed work and in the solos (the flute!) that you don’t think you’re dealing with a youth orchestra. Kodály’s exceedingly colorful score comes to fiery life.

Only pieces by composers from the Danube monarchy are played – even though Joseph Haydn wrote the “Sinfonia concertante” in London. The genre term describes an orchestral piece with several solo instruments. Robert Amadeo Sanders (violin) dominates the performance with a cantabile line, the score specifies it, but Benedikt Sinko (cello), Katharina Kratochwil (oboe) and above all Traian-Petroniu Sturza (bassoon) can also set accents.

As is almost always the case, Antonín Dvorák invented glorious, heart-warming melodies and themes in his 8th Symphony, and here too the cellos introduce the main theme. Conductor Hanus, a downer, does not have the dynamics of the brass under control, it regularly shatters the fine balance. The light-footed Adagio provides an opportunity to rest, while the Scherzo seems to anticipate the far-flung sentiment of Dvorák’s last symphony, From the New World. What the trumpets are actually capable of, they briefly show at the beginning of the unadulterated jubilant finale, which the Academy plays with a sinewy, never splintering string sound. As an encore, the 15th Slavic Dance, and it’s really rocking now. You can never get enough of Dvorák.