SPONSORED: DVD Spotlight. Olympic Scale - Charles Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, reviewed by Robert Anderson.
All sponsored features >>
To say the National Youth Orchestra is a match for almost any of the most prominent professional UK ensembles might sound an exaggeration.
Yet it isn't. It was superbly evident in their magnificent recorded concert relayed last night on BBC Radio 3 (and which can also be heard online on BBC Sounds for thirty days afterwards).
Members of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain on their Illuminate January 2025 concert tour
True, there are plenty of youth orchestras which might merit a virtually similar claim. Wales, for instance, has it own youth orchestra dating back to the aftermath of the Second World War, which deserves an impressively high rating. With the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland proclaimed in 1978, over a hundred beautifully dressed young performers turned out in early 1979 - with funds from the Carnegie Trust - to start performing along the east coast. Four years later they were in the Orkneys, Faeroes and mainland Scandinavia, at the Edinburgh Festival the next August, and the BBC Proms to celebrate its first decade, producing world-famous soloists such as violinist Nicola Benedetti and percussionist Colin Currie (whom this concert's percussion and tympani section came close to matching). Admirably they have a Junior Orchestra now.
Counties - Kent, Sussex - field their own ensembles. (Michael Tippett famously espoused, or was espoused by, Leicestershire Schools.) Indeed schools - most obviously Chethams, but also Wells, the Yehudi Menuhin and Purcell schools, frequently shine.
Abroad also, of course. Bavaria has two (the State Youth and the Opera Youth). In January 2025 the German National Youth Orchestra (Bundesjugendorchester) will give concerts including in the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, named after Germany's famous river), the Musikverein in Vienna, and at London's Cadogan Hall and Birmingham's Symphony Hall. In the United States the Portland Youth Philharmonic, the world's oldest, dates from 1924; countless other cities and states have followed.
Romania, Ukraine - all the countries of Europe - have realised the importance of such enterprises. The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester is based in Vienna. The European Union Youth Orchestra is also based west of Vienna, at Grafenegg on the Danube. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an example of true humanity bringing together Jewish and Arab players - one of the finest and most humanist achievements, among so many, of Daniel Barenboim, overseen by the daniel-barenboim-stiftung.org in (as it happens) Berlin - has its share of younger performers.
The Palestine Youth Orchestra has just turned twenty years old. Perhaps the most remarkable are the Gaza (Youth) Orchestra; and amazingly, the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq, founded and given new life from 2009 by my good friend Paul Macalindin. In short, there are miracles occurring the world over.
Members of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq
The most celebrated youth music organisation is El Sistema in Venezuela, which launched the career of firebrand conductor Gustavo Dudamel and yielded first, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra (now an adult ensemble), succeeded by the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra.
Enough history, for this story is about the marvellous and magnificent National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (NYOGB). What a gathering of fabulous young talent. What amazing musical quality they exemplify. What exemplary command of their individual instruments, and equally of their melding together into a masterly, unified brotherhood and sisterhood - not that there is any distinction. They play as one, and that was wholly evident throughout under the baton of Spaniard Jaime Martín. (As a flautist from Basque Santander, he is a former member, no surprise, aged thirteen, of the National Youth Orchestra of Spain.)
Jaime Martín
Perhaps you can tell, for Martín's empathy with his young players shows at every turn. His conducting is expressive, he can generate beautifully engineered slow passages, he can maintain an extended adagio or legato, yet he never intrudes, keeps out of the way, warmly gives his charges a tender lead, keeping them loyally with him.
Violinist Peter Ryan, leader of the
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
Ravel's Boléro came first. Not only did Martín generate an electrifying performance - with Ravel's ingenious gradual crescendo stage by stage and its miraculous string tone brought out in a truly memorable way - but standing out were the soli which pepper the work, each and every one exemplifying the individual players', or section leaders', staggering and utterly professional mastery of their own instruments - oboe, horn, trumpet etc. Fascinating that Ravel considered the rhythms - evoking the daring of a Spanish toreador - were inspired by the machines of his father's factory, and the alluring overrriding melody came from a nursery song his mother sang to him at bedtime. Interesting also that the same besotting tune, immensely popular, originated from the mid-1700s. Here, the whole thing, or most, beetling then grinding away (then blasting) in C major, astonishingly, till the terrific, almost mocking late key shift took us by surprise and delight.
If the solos were matched by the enticing and endlessly prolific strings, from whom Martín evokes such carefully measured tone and dynamics, these were as much or even more the case in their midway offering, Catamorphosis, a newish work by the much-lauded, much-performed and much-awarded Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, still in her mid-forties. Her work, doubtless a significant part of the NYO's current 'Illuminate' series, was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic, no less, under their current Music Director Kirill Petrenko (2021), and in the UK by the CBSO. Thorvaldsdóttir's Metacosmos saw the light of day in New York under Esa-Pekka Salonen. Archora was a triumph at the BBC Proms - yet another accolade - and commissioned by them and five other orchestras or festivals, from Los Angeles to Paris and Munich - a sign of modern financing needs and a frequent solution. Notably, her compositions have been featured right across the USA.
The NYO administration's ability to bring together attractive and original programmes is one of its many admirable features. Catamorphosis is described, among other things, as a response to nature. It is beautiful, riddled with marvellous solo touches, sensationally written for the strings (with evocative moments for, eg, double basses and violas). I can't say I got the rural allusions, though others seem to have done, and perhaps the same can be said about Beethoven's Pastoral. Attractive as its twenty minutes are, I found the work simplistic in its maintenance of largely the same slow tempi, and hence demeanour. Nicely crafted, but even dull. Or plodding. Not, possibly, her finest. Yet few would agree with me. And the ability of the orchestra to evolve so exquisitely the work's charm and besotting appeal made of it an experience which enchanted the audience. A success, therefore.
What followed was Carl Nielsen's Fourth Symphony, dubbed by him the 'Inextinguishable' ('Det Uudslukkelige'). Widely performed and often claimed as his most 'dramatic' symphony, there might be some doubt about that. While the Fourth includes a fascinating, disconcerting, even frightening dialogue between the two separately placed timpanists, his Fifth is yet more awesome not just through the explosive opening but throughout much of the first movement. The side-drum's role is overpowering.
His other symphonies, several premiered with Nielsen himself conducting, differ: the First is almost traditional late nineteenth century, like Svendsen or Alfven or a couple of the earliest of Sibelius' symphonic poems. The Four Temperaments (No 2), dedicated intriguingly to fellow composer Busoni, tentatively explores more attractive moods. The Third, Sinfonia Expansiva, is just that: like, say, Tchaikovsky's Third (Polish). No 6 is the most fascinating, treating the orchestra like chamber music - delicate, subtle, daring and modern.
But what a scintillating performance the NYO under Jaime Martín offered us. Written in four movements, or sections, the Fourth is played attacca - without a break. Here, with this sensational young orchestra, the whole thing was thrilling. Once again, the polished, highly accomplished solo or sectional work blew one away: a sudden surge of previously submerged trumpets; the virtual blast of eight or so double basses; the remarkably not so angry but conversational French horns, led here by co-leader Georgia Paxton; Dublin-born Peter Ryan, the NYO's attractively capable leader (and once the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland's youngest violinist), both solo and paired with violist Clio Proffitt in wonderful hushed duo; or the gorgeously expressive massed violas; articulate, pleading solo bassoon; triple trombones; sizzling percussion; hints of delicate, fragile celesta to underline the Fourth's softer passages. (Yes, there are some.) And those battering, battling timpanists.
French horn players on the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain's Illuminate January 2025 concert tour
An encore was cried out for, and well deserved. It came almost comically: the Waltz, a dancing highlight from Shostakovich's Jazz Suite No 2 (recorded by, for example, Riccardo Chailly on Decca or the Russian State Symphony Orchestra on Naxos), a huge hit here, and heard again in the bar/restaurant afterwards played by a flawless, sensitive group of girl harpists. What a treat.
So - is the NYOGB up to the standard of our great orchestras? It is, and has been for a long time. Hats off. True quality, exciting freshness, magnificent musicianship. An example to us all.
Copyright © 15 January 2025
Roderic Dunnett,
Coventry UK