Geoffrey Newman, Seen and Heard International, 13th August 2015
For a long time, I was suspicious of how good national youth orchestras could be. This all changed about 20 years ago when I heard Christopher Seaman put the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain through its paces at the Barbican and bring an unforgettable freshness and energy to Elgar’s First Symphony. There was something of the same feeling on this occasion: 90 young Canadian musicians aged 16-28, playing their hearts out under young British maestro Michael Francis, the culmination of 5 weeks of intensive training for their 2015 TD National Tour…
…The ensemble showed the results of pretty rigorous training under the maestro, and all parts of the orchestra displayed their mettle. The brass was incisive throughout ̶ the horns impressively smooth ̶ and the winds exhibited musicality and occasional virtuosity, particularly the clarinets. The strings were clean and disciplined, although the slight lack of richness and smoothness, relative to professional groups, was to be expected.
Strauss’ Don Quixote is not the easiest work for a youth orchestra to come to grips with, but it came out quite splendidly in a sharp, tightly knit reading, electric in feeling and concentration, perhaps somewhat in the spirit of Pierre Fournier and George Szell many years ago…The full ensemble handled both Strauss’ more exotic and more exuberant passages with finesse and confidence, making for quite a magnetic experience.
The work that followed was Ocaso, by Vancouver composer Alfredo Santa Ana, commissioned by NYO Canada; it received its world premiere just three days earlier in Montreal. This is a well-written piece that did not outstay its welcome. It started from string pizzicato, vaguely in the spirit of the second movement in Britten’s Simple Symphony, eventually broadening out to allow a more cinematic theme on the brass. After a relaxed interlude for winds, a neoclassical fervour in the strings took over in the concluding section, building to an abrupt ending. The structural cogency of the work was distinctive, and its performance here was impeccable.
The showpiece of the evening was Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, dispatched with tremendous drive and verve, and displaying what the orchestra is capable of…this was a true spectacle, showcasing the skills and sheer joy of these young musicians performing at white heat. It was quite sufficient to bring the house down.
