The classical music world wakes slowly in January. Orchestral concerts don’t get going properly until mid-month and most halls are quiet, a noble, open-all-hours exception being Wigmore Hall, of which more shortly. This means the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain can enjoy the limelight it so resoundingly deserves for its post-Christmas showcase. The 164 participating teenagers, from all corners of the UK, rehearse in the holidays – one of three annual residential courses – and give public performances, this new year in Coventry, Nottingham and London, just before school term starts. Anticipated not just by loyal families (audiences are always abuzz with excited siblings) but by anyone anxious about the future of orchestral life, these NYO events anoint the year with hope.
The orchestra chose Rise Up! as the slogan for its winter tour. This command, sober and urgent, related in part to the music played. Shostakovich wrote his epic Symphony No 11, “The Year 1905”, just after the Hungarian uprising of 1957. Its title refers back to the “Bloody Sunday” massacre of anti-tsarist demonstrators in St Petersburg early last century. Vivid, brooding, ferocious, the work proved ideal for the huge forces crammed on stage at the Barbican, with notably brilliant work from the solo cor anglais, the hard-worked, thunderous percussion section, the darkly lyrical violas – especially in their third-movement melody – and the beautifully drilled, gutsy cellos. The Spanish conductor Jaime Martín, himself a former orchestral flautist, managed to inspire the best in everyone, including those far away on the back desks.
Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, above all a lament against war, its shadowy nuances not easily captured by so large an ensemble, and Eisler’s demonstration song Auf den Strassen zu singen (We are singing in the streets), tell their own story of loss and protest. Turning themselves into a fresh-voiced choir for the Eisler, the NYO showed their versatility as musicians, also performing some of the revolutionary songs that Shostakovich buried in his symphony. You might not want to hear these vocal additions every time, but they shed light and meaning for listener and performer alike.
Yet Rise Up! had wider, not to say comprehensive, meaning, expressed with an intensity that certainly informed the NYO performances, of the Shostakovich especially. From the short, stirring platform welcome by a violinist from Glasgow, and a note in the programme from the NYO’s leader, 17-year-old Kynan Walker from Sutton Coldfield, this was no ordinary event. “Tonight’s programme shows our want for change,” Walker writes, going on to cite issues in which many young people have been involved, from Brexit and the NHS to the environment. It may seem extraneous to musical issues, but these committed teenagers should have their message shared.
At the same time, the NYO’s chief executive, Sarah Alexander, had her own call to arms: to fight for the survival of music in schools and, by extension, concert halls. This orchestra has undergone its own velvet revolution in the past decade. Aware of its once narrow social past since its foundation in 1948, it now makes every effort to embrace diversity, and to welcome the promising many (through its programme NYO Inspire), rather than merely the gifted, and often highly privileged, few. All power to their uprising.
From word of mouth it’s clear that Wigmore Hall, starting the season as it means to go on, has already notched up some top concerts – among them a recital by the young Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov and a Britten programme with the tenor Allan Clayton. My first, on Monday, was a mainly Brahms chamber concert devised by the pianist Stephen Hough as part of his Wigmore residency. Typically of Hough, he generously gave the lion’s share to his fellow musicians, the clarinettist Michael Collins and, rising stars in their field, the Castalian String Quartet. They played Hough’s skilful quintet arrangement of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in F, Op 24, “Spring”: sunny, witty, idiomatic, and a highly original start to Beethoven 250 – the name being used worldwide to mark the anniversary of the composer’s birth.
Hough and Collins, old friends, joined forces in Brahms’s two clarinet sonatas (often played as viola sonatas too) with an ideal union of wistfulness and passion. Pivotal in the history of the clarinet but, for the rest of us, glories of the chamber repertoire, these contrasting works were the last chamber music Brahms wrote. How Collins managed to sustain his energy, as well as his seemingly limitless, invisibly achieved breath control, is anyone’s guess. The Clarinet Quintet, a desert island choice for many of us, given a desert island-worthy performance here, ended the concert. To hear this music, so full of poetry, joy and sorrow, realised to such perfection, felt like a miracle.
Star ratings (out of five)
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain ★★★★
Stephen Hough ★★★★★
• The NYO’s Barbican concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Monday 13 January at 7.30pm, then available on BBC Sounds
• Stephen Hough’s Wigmore Hall concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Thursday 12 March, 7.30pm, then on BBC Sounds
