Young musicians, old instruments

In a landscape where Baroque music is virtually absent from youth orchestras, the Bayerisches Jugend-Barockorchester (also known as BayJuBa) founded in 2015 by Ralf Jaensch and the Le Nuove Musiche association at the Musikakademie Alteglofsheim, stands out as an exception. Welcoming musicians from the age of 12, it offers them the rare opportunity to play exclusively on period instruments. Rigorous training, individual lessons, work with international specialists, and an intense collective life make it a unique laboratory where learning, autonomy, and passion for a repertoire still largely inaccessible to the youngest come together.

Katharina Bechthold, now 22, joined BayJuBa eight years ago, at the suggestion of her violin teacher, who encouraged her to try a period instrument. “I didn’t even know that Baroque music and Baroque instruments existed. When you’re not doing specialised studies (which is my case), there are very few opportunities to play Baroque music in an orchestra at such a level… or even to play it at all! I went, I loved it, and I stayed.” And she didn’t just stay with the orchestra: she has remained faithful to the Baroque instrument.

“During our first sessions,” recalls Friederike Heumann (professor of viola da gamba at the Hochschule für Musik in Würzburg, co-initiator and regular coach of BayJuBa), “we had borrowed as many historical, gut-strung instruments as possible, but we assumed that the children and teenagers would prefer to play on their modern instruments at first, and that they might be very brave if they so much as picked up a gut-stringed instrument for a moment… But not at all! They all wanted to play directly on the Baroque instruments, and after that, they didn’t want to give them back!”

This success began with a workshop entitled “Historical Performance Practice for Young Musicians”, organized in the fall of 2014 at the Bayerische Musikakademie Alteglofsheim by the association Le Nuove Musiche and its president, Ralf Jaensch, who also co-organizes the early-music festival Residenzwoche München. The participants were so enthusiastic about discovering these old instruments that, by February 2015, the Bayerisches Jugend-Barockorchester was founded for them.

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