With the Luxembourg Philharmonic, Riccardo Minasi and Nikola Meeuwsen
On Thursday, 4 December 2025, at 7:30 p.m. in the Grand Auditorium, the Luxembourg Philharmonic will perform the 49th SOS Villages d’Enfants Monde Gala Concert.
For the past 10 years, this concert has welcomed the first prize winner of the prestigious Queen Elisabeth International Competition as soloist. This year, it is the young Dutch pianist Nikola Meeuwsen, born in 2002 in The Hague, whose talent was recognised at a very young age (winner of the Steinway Competition at the age of nine, Concertgebouw Young Talent Award 2019). Trained at the famous Accademia Pianistica in Imola (Marlies van Gent, Enrico Pace), he has been artist in residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel (Frank Braley, Avedis Kouyoumdjian) since 2022.
For the Luxembourg audience, he will perform Sergei Prokofiev’s ‘volcanic’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in the first half of the evening, a work he played in the final of the Queen Elisabeth Competition.
The Luxembourg Philharmonic will be conducted by the renowned Italian conductor Riccardo Minasi, who is also a violinist and one of the most promising talents on the European classical music scene. Since 2022, he has been the principal guest conductor of Ensemble Resonanz, one of the world’s finest chamber orchestras, which combines classical and contemporary music in lively performances at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.
After the interval, the atmosphere at the Philharmonie will change completely with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, ‘Pastoral’, a true ode to nature, performed by the orchestra.
The proceeds from the evening, organised with the generous support of EY, will go to vulnerable children, young people and families in Guinea, notably through development programmes* focused on children’s and young people’s rights and employability. These programmes are implemented in four regions/localities (Conakry, Kankan, Labé and N’Zérékoré) by SOS Children’s Villages in Guinea, which has been present in the country for 40 years.