The National Youth Orchestra begins each day by sitting for two minutes in complete silence. It’s a perfect exercise for focusing on the task in hand, but also a vivid reminder that one of the most vital skills an orchestral musician must develop is the ability to listen.
Such intense, hyper-awareness among the players explains how, every year, a disparate pool of individual talent is recalibrated into a single, enormous entity over the course of a brief post-Christmas workshop. It’s especially impressive given that well over half of the 2015 edition, with an average age of just 14, are new to the orchestra.
John Wilson has a benign, encouraging presence on the podium, and it didn’t take long for the newbies to bed in. Elgar stated that his intention in orchestrating Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in C minor “was to show how gorgeous, great and brilliant Bach would have made himself sound if he had the means”. It’s tempting to suppose that if Bach had the means of four harps, a mammoth percussion section and an ocean of strings at his disposal he would have had the taste not to use them. But it made an ideal toe-in-the-water piece in which everyone got to blow off their nerves.
The remainder of the programme gave the impression of a fearless young army on the move. Both Respighi’s The Pines of Rome and Elgar’s First Symphony culminate in unassailable marches; and, despite the latter’s status as the first great English symphony, it was largely composed in the Eternal City.
The smart tempo of Wilson’s Respighi carried the sense of a proud centurion leading his legion down the Appian Way, whereas the euphoric adrenaline rush at the end of the Elgar marked the point at which the boot camp of rehearsals culminated in the victory parade of performance.
