9 August 1999

A Performance of atmosphere, vigour and pungency

...No more fearsome challenge could face these young musicians than Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, save, perhaps, Mark-Anthony Turnage's Silent Cities, a dynamic, anguished, war-torn piece that asserted strong creative drive and a forceful emotional temperament. But the Bartók showpiece sparked a performance of atmosphere, vigour and pungency.

Geoffrey Norris

10 August 1999

Idiomatic, virtuosic playing

The NYO's concert opened with the first London performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Silent Cities, a work inspired by visiting the graveyards of the Somme. Perhaps it gained extra poignancy through being played by people of almost the same age as those war victims. It is an impressive score without being one of Turnage's most hard-hitting statements: after erupting noisily, the piece takes shape as a heaving mass, characterised by desolate colours and punctuated by big outbursts. It is angry rather than elegiac in tone.

Two equally grown-up performances filled the young players' programme. Under Iván Fischer's baton they were alert, sensitive accompanists in the Dvorák Violin Concerto, and Leonidas Kavakos brought sweet tone to the dreamy, lyrical solos. Fischer, widely admired for the interpretations of his fellow Hungarian Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, clearly inspired the NYO in this showpiece. They teased out the melodies idiomatically, and showed real virtuosity too.

John Allison

9 August 1999

The high spot of last week's Proms

On Saturday Mark-Anthony Turnage's more recent - and rather more instantly appealing - Silent Cities cued seething climaxes from the thematic "core" of a tune called "The Nag". Inspired by a visit to the Somme and dedicated to Tippett's memory, Turnage's gripping essay was given its London Première by a generously manned National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain under Iván Fischer. Fischer's NYO was refreshingly individualistic in Bartók and Dvorák. Leonidas Kavakos brought lashings of lustrous tone to Dvorák's lilting Violin Concerto. But the high-spot of last week's Proms, playing-wise, was the NYO's white-hot account of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra. Many readers will already know that Fischer is peerless among living Bartók conductors, but Saturday's performance showed how he can inspire young players to colour, shade, inflect and shape phrases with a degree of spontaneity that eludes many a seasoned orchestra. And they make a pretty good choir, too. Saturday's unexpected encore was Gibbon's brief but glorious, "The Silver Swan".

Rob Cowan

9 August 1999

The Cygnets take flight

More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise. It was the most moving and unexpected moment of the Proms so far when at the end of their concert on Saturday night, the 153 members of the National Youth Orchestra downed their instruments, stood up and sang Orlando Gibbons's unaccompanied part-song The Silver Swan, a setting of the above lyric.

The honour of conducting the nation's cygnets went this year to the engaging Hungarian Iván Fischer, founder otherwise of the prize-winning Budapest Festival Orchestra. He led a thrilling performance of his compatriot Bartók's last work, the Concerto for Orchestra, inspiring a disciplined sprint with his karate-chop beat in the finale. The sneering reference to Shostakovich was under-played, but then the world now realises that the Russian's goose-like banalities were deliberate.

In the first half, the Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos played Dvorák's Violin Concerto, wistfully in the slow movement and with frolicking exuberance in the finale. The green fields of bohemia were never far from its heart. The green fields of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Silent Cities were full of First World War graveyards as his note explained. The piece was suitably leaden-footed and muddy in texture. The dark violas set the pace with a low twisting theme which eventually infects the whole pulsating, brutal orchestra.

Rick Jones