Music

NYOS Senior Orchestra, Perth Concert Hall

Michael Tumelty

Three stars

I FELT a peculiar, mounting sense of frustration through the first half of the concert in Perth on Monday night by the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland's Senior Orchestra - that's the 13 to 18-year-old NYOS group of musicians. It was half time before I fully identified the cause. The young orchestra, conducted by James Lowe, had opened with Bartok's Hungarian Sketches, a set of five short, orchestrated, folk-based character pieces that brought some very clean, telling and lovely playing from the youngsters.

Then that was followed by performances from NYOS alumnus, violinist Daniel Rainey, now training in London, who played Chausson's Poeme for Violin and orchestra and Saint-Saens' Havanaise, both pieces of music with rather more style than substance, and neither of which, frankly, particularly seized me as a performance, other than from a display point of view. That was the frustration: I remarked to somebody at the interval that I felt I'd not heard much of the NYOS Seniors so far, other than in an accompanimental capacity.

After the interval, things picked up a bit with the Seniors' no-holds-barred, full-on, battering performance of Anna Clyne's punchily-percussive, minimalist-y opus, Rewind, an extremely well-written assault on the senses, before James Lowe unleashed the young players in a ferociously-fast account of Sibelius' First Symphony that seemed to favour speed at the expense of breadth, and which could have done with considerably more work in balancing the orchestral ensemble, including the brass section, which was dangerously close to being out of order in terms of overwhelming other sections with sheer weight and volume.