The international jury meeting for session 2025 took place in Brussels, Belgium between 26-27 of January. During these days the jury selected the best singers from 240 candidates. After many hours of listening to the numerous recordings and evaluating the applicants, the international jury finally chose 64 singers from 37 countries to be part of the World Youth Choir 2025 session and 7 other countries are represented in the reserve list.​

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Selection criteria

The selection was made by an international jury composed by the artistic director of the 2025 session - Daniel Reuss - and a jury representative from each of the three World Youth Choir patron organisations: Victoria Liedbergius on behalf of the European Choral Association, Burak Onur Erdem on behalf of the International Federation for Choral Music and Sasho Tatarchevski on behalf of Jeunesses Musicales International.

The process was conducted taking into account the artistic and musical quality of each candidate through all the audition files submitted: voice range, sight reading abilities, vocal technical skills, ability to prepare a piece and voice performance throughout. Furthermore, the jury also took into consideration the complementarity of the voices of the singers selected in order to create a cohesive group in each section and for the whole choir and, whenever possible, to amplify the diversity of countries represented in the World Youth Choir.

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All singers are within the age limit. For the section leaders, they can be up to 35 years old. The average age of the choir, excluding the section leaders, is 24.

The choice was often hard for the jury and the singers selected have now a heavy responsibility being part of the 2025 session. Many others could be also part of the choir and not being selected does not diminish their skills. The jury members invite all of them to continue vocal training to improve their musical abilities and performance and, for those who have not reached the age limit, to audition again next year.

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Acknowledgments​

The World Youth Choir Foundation would like to acknowledge all our partners, recruiters, alumni and audition supervisors that helped audition over 240 singers for this year’s edition of the programme. The recruitment process could not have been carried out without their invaluable help and for this we would like to publicly thank them.

We also thank the World Youth Choir jury and conductor for carrying out the hard task of listening to all the audition files and performing a fair and balanced selection of talented singers which will integrate the choir this year.