Lollapalooza - John Adams
Piano Concerto No 1 - Mendelssohn
Symphony No 5 - Tchaikovsky
You don't have to hear much of the playing of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra to know that it's a youth orchestra quite apart from those we hear frequently here in Ireland. It's actually a sibling of the San Francisco Symphony, and stands as a great tribute to that orchestra's commitment to education and community involvement. And, unlike, say, our own National Youth Orchestra, which meets for pre-concert courses twice a year, it trains every Saturday, partially under the guidance of members of the San Francisco Symphony; it also works with the orchestra's own conductors as well as a range of visiting conductors and soloists.
The orchestra's music director of 11 years standing, Alasdair Neale, clearly has a fine rapport with his players. He's a man with lots of ideas about the music he plays, and his young cohorts were with him all the way at the NCH on Thursday, through every nudge and sigh and adrenaline rush in Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Edge-of-the-seat experiences are not really that unusual in youth orchestra concerts. The sense of spaciousness, of music being shaped within an atmosphere of relaxation, that this orchestra was able to communicate is rather more rare.
The soloist in Mendelssohn's First Piano Concerto was the 25-year-old Italian, Davide Franceschetti, best known in Ireland for having taken the first prize at the 1994 Dublin International Piano Competition. Franceschetti is a player of remarkable keyboard facility. Like one of those teenage tennis marvels, he seems to feel no fear, nor find anything unusual about his achievements, particularly that aspect of his playing for which the Germans have coined the best word, Fingerfertigkeit, finger readiness.
Perhaps the sheer elan he was able to bring to the Mendelssohn proved something of a barrier to any deeper probing. The work may be mostly light, but it still can be communicated with greater depth and substance than Franceschetti mustered. Almost as if he were aware of this, he offered as his single encore an autumnally coloured account of Brahms's Intermezzo in A, Op. 118, No 2. The concert opened with an inspiriting account of John Adams's fizzy, snazzy Lollapalooza, a 1995 festive birthday present for Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (his 40th, the orchestra's 75th).
