Perhaps 2020 is going to be the year in which orchestral players reveal their yearnings to be singers. Just a month ago at the Barbican, the Budapest Festival Orchestra had turned itself into an a cappella choir to sing some choruses by Dvořák, and here it was the invariably awe-inspiring National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Jaime Martín, beginning their concert with Hanns Eisler’s demonstration song Auf den Strassen zu Singen (We are Singing in the Streets), their 160 voices unaccompanied apart from the intervention of a side drum to drive the song to its urgent, aspirational climax.
It made the perfect start to a concert that had been built around the theme of protest. It ended with Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony, “The Year 1905”, reflecting the events of that year in St Petersburg, when demonstrators marched to the Winter Palace to petition the tsar and a bloody massacre followed. Most of the symphony’s themes are based on 19th-century revolutionary songs, and NYOGB morphed back into a choir again to sing three of them to preface the movements in which they are featured most prominently.
But it was the technical brilliance and ferocity of the orchestral performance that impressed even more: not only in the rasping brass and howling woodwind, but in the intensity of the string playing, whether raw-edged in the fierce second-movement scherzo, The Ninth of January, or plangently elegiac in the dialogue that opens the third, Eternal Memory.
The 11th is hardly the subtlest of Shostakovich’s symphonies, but it is one of the most graphic, and Martín’s high-pressure, high-speed performance didn’t spare any of its vividness.
The centrepiece of the programme was Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, but here Martín’s hell-for-leather approach wasn’t quite so successful, the ensemble not as tight and faultless as it was in the Shostakovich, and with a lot more depth to be found in the outer movements than was suggested here. But it still fitted perfectly into what was an extraordinarily stirring, uplifting concert.
• At the Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, on 6 January.
