Aberdeen International Youth Festival

Aberdeen International Youth Festival is a Festival of Youth Arts, and one of Scotland's major international cultural events.

Every year Aberdeen International Youth Festival attracts over 1000 young people in performing arts companies and music groups from across the globe. It provides a showcase for their talents, bringing them together with professionals and artists.

As well as the ticketed events the Festival stages a parade, open-air performances and a fringe programme in community venues.

A programme attracts over 30,000 people to more than seventy events throughout north east Scotland. There are concerts, dance shows and galas in Aberdeen venues such as His Majesty's Theatre, The Music Hall and The Lemon Tree as well as smaller venues such as churches (such as Queen's Cross Church, Aberdeen) and also features a touring programme taking events to rural venues.

The AIYF programme includes symphony orchestras and steel bands, song recitals and jazz, traditional music, world music, ballet, contemporary and traditional dance. The festival also produces a young opera, (Opera Garden) as well as producing performances developed by the participating companies working together over the course of the Festival.

The festival was created in the late 1960s by the late Blyth Major, Music Director of the Midland Youth Orchestra and Lionel Bryer, later Chairman of the International Youth Foundation. They conceived the idea of bringing together youth orchestras from all over the world at a festival using music as a unifying bond to promote international understanding. The first International Festival of Youth Orchestras was held in 1969 in St Moritz in Switzerland.

Invited by the British Tourist Authority, in 1973 the festival moved to the UK and established a base both in Aberdeen and London for the following five years. Due to the facilities and support in the City of Aberdeen and its university, the festival was able to expand to incorporate all forms of dance, jazz and choral music.

Internationally renowned guest conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Carlo Maria Giulini, Walter Susskind and Leopold Stokowski, were invited to conduct the Festival Orchestra - a specially created orchestra, which was invited to appear at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and also played at the opening concert of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1978 (the first youth orchestra to appear at The Edinburgh Festival).

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Wikipedia