The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain sets its sights high and in this programme, conceived on a cosmic scale, it took the Snape Proms audience on a space odyssey. Accepting that Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra will never shake off the associations acquired through Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001 and the lunar pioneers, the NYO and conductor Edward Gardner set it alongside Gustav Holst’s The Planets. In both works, the 160-plus forces achieved a depth and richness of sound that belied their youth. There was never such a good night to be a tuba player or a double bassist.
Out of Strauss’s initial epic monumentality came grace and verve; leader Millie Ashton delivering the questing solo violin lines. Following a glowingly dynamic account of the Holst, Gardner went on to argue the strongest possible case for Colin Matthews’s Pluto, written for the millennium. Growing out of mystic Neptune’s dying notes – sung by the girls of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra youth choir – the feeling here was of an implicit and organic connection with the original suite. Moreover, the shimmering solar winds of Pluto took the ear back, orbit completed, to the work specially commissioned to launch the evening.
Iris ter Schiphorst’s Gravitational Waves was inspired by new scientific research validating Einstein, and it summoned a novel and symbolic mix of visual, aural and vocal gestures. The synchrony, whereby the players first wore white or black masks, then embodied the waves of the title in perfectly choreographed movements rippling through the serried ranks, created an arresting counterpoint to the imaginative, otherwordly soundscape realised by Ter Schiphorst and co-composer Uros Rojko. Evanescent and evocative, embracing known and unknown, it captured something of the awesome history and infinity of time.
- At Symphony Hall, Birmingham on 5 August. Box office: 0121-780 333. Then at the BBC Proms, London, on Saturday. Box Office: 020-7589 8212.
