One thing that concerts by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain unfailingly deliver is a big sound. More than 150 young instrumentalists were assembled on stage for the orchestra’s latest programme, which was conducted by John Wilson, and as usual they offered a thrilling display of teenage talent. But, while it’s easy to understand why NYOGB is always keen to give as many as possible of the musicians it auditions the chance to appear in its concerts, whether such massive forces suit everything the orchestra plays is another matter.

In some works such a weight of focused sound can be genuinely exciting. But neither Szymanowski’s Fourth Symphony, his Symphonie Concertante for piano and orchestra, nor Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony really needs the seven-fold woodwind that lined up for it here.

Wilson energised and balanced everything very precisely, but even in Symphony Hall, which can probably clarify such massive textures better than anywhere else in Britain, there were moments in both works that suffered from problems of scale. Tamara Stefanovich’s fabulously secure solo playing tended to disappear altogether at the climaxes of the Szymanowski, while, though played with enormous verve and skill, the outer movements of the Rachmaninov seemed glutinous and flabby. Even the beautifully sculpted clarinet solo in the slow movement sounded oddly out of place in such a larger-than-life performance.

The published programme began with Brett Dean’s Komarov’s Fall – his short, touching memorial to the first astronaut to die in space – but before it one of the orchestra’s cellists, Joshua Mock, had conducted a beautifully paced account of Suspended Between Earth and Air, by NYOGB’s principal composer scholar, 16-year-old Lauren Marshall, which unfolds a sequence of striking musical images – fluttering woodwind, dense packed clusters and a final, enigmatic chorale – in a wonderfully assured way.

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