★★★★☆
Two of Britain’s great musical assets met in this Prom, which took us on a journey from starry skies to the ancient earth. The National Youth Orchestra is a super-sized ensemble, made up of super-talented teenagers, hungry for musical challenges. Here they had them aplenty, thanks to the conductor-composer Thomas Adès. His stretching programme was matched by his demanding approach, drawing on a composer’s analytical nous and creative instincts to take these 164 musicians into every corner of the music. And, boy, did NYO play well: virtuosic, concentrated and seriously impressive.
My heart, though, slightly sank in the percussion-heavy opening of Francisco Coll’s Mural, a five-movement “Grotesque Symphony” first performed in Luxembourg last year. A little too often I feel as if composers have been let loose in the percussion toy box. But I was wrong. This 32-year-old Spanish composer, Adès’s only pupil, shares his teacher’s ear for alluring orchestral effects. Nor are they surface gloss: they shape the music itself.
He’s also firmly in control of energy and pace, and has an ear for contrasts. In Mural, Apollo meets Dionysus, slow and fast movements alternate, fragments of Victoria’s Requiem meet modern anxiety. And Coll is good at endings: a marvellous chord that seems to be at once standing still and teeming with life concludes the central movement, while the finale is pared back to a simple glimpse of E-major purity. Yet when that evaporates, a quiet cluster hangs on – a shadow of doubt.
Adès’s own Polaris (2010) followed, a “voyage for orchestra”. The pole star is this compelling piece’s guiding light and here groups of brass were dotted around the galleries high above, drawing our ears up as they unfurled their celestial sounds, while the rest of the orchestra sailed on below. The sense of gravitational forces at work, the pull of moon and tide, was especially strong.
After this showcase of the new, there was an appealing inevitability to the final piece, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The Russian is, says Adès, a “terminus you have to go through to get anywhere on the train”. This was a Rite of incredible discipline – with razor-sharp chords and icy strings – and dynamic extremes. Fleet and implacably fierce, Adès’s reading of this 104-year-old score made it sound as modern as ever.