National Youth Orchestra/ Chauhan: Collide review – surging energy and remarkable intensity

Young performers brought tremendous quality and personal touches to a concert of works from Wagner to pop star Jacob Collier, under the focused guidance of new principal conductor Alpesh Chauhan

There’s always more at an NYO concert. More players: 160 this time, crammed on to a platform that seems full with half that number. More of the energy that comes with the fact that, for every player, this is a very special occasion. And, in recent seasons, more stuff to remind us that these are teenagers, not hard-bitten professionals.

This time there was a semi-choreographed walk-on to a mashup of Raye and Chaka Khan, with the percussion taking the lead and the assembled orchestra eventually joining in. There was a short speech from one of the players before each work – somewhere between pointing out a personal connection with the music and giving superfluous justification for its inclusion. And as an encore – sung, not played – there was Jacob Collier’s Something Heavy, with a bit more choreography.

Safe to say the other orchestras conducted by Alpesh Chauhan, the NYO’s new principal conductor, don’t ask all this of their players. But often the tautness and focus of the playing exceeded what he might expect from others too. He waited for absolute silence in the hall before bringing the cellos in for the first notes of Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde: what else could this impossibly slender thread of sound grow from? The intensity in these phrases, each cello question landing on a perfectly tuned woodwind chord, was remarkable. It blossomed into a performance of surging energy, its early rhythmic drive setting up a momentum that endured even as the music moved towards resolution.

Joe Hisaishi’s Symphonic Variation Merry-Go-Round + Cave of Mind, taken from his 2004 film score for the film Howl’s Moving Castle, had made a lively opener, strings super-responsive to Chauhan’s shaping of the whirling waltz, the wind and brass solos excellently handled, the piano capturing the music’s melancholy sweetness. And there were plenty of vivid moments in the sequence of episodes from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, with the orchestra sounding thrilling at the emotional climaxes and the massed bass instruments providing the sense of growling menace that underpins the whole thing. This was a programme based on stories, compellingly told.

• The NYO’s Bridgewater Hall performance of this programme will air on BBC Radio 3, on 1 July