National Youth Orchestra at the Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

The NZSO National Youth Orchestra's annual concert has become one of the city's mid-winter highlights, giving 90 young musicians to chance to show what a week's intensive work with an international conductor can achieve.

In 2002, the charismatic Benjamin Zander thrilled us with Ives and Stravinsky. Last year, with Lutz Koehler, we had a Mahler First that was startling in its maturity.

This year's guest conductor, Alasdair Neale, comes with unimpeachable credentials with the San Francisco Youth Orchestra, and yet a programme of Berlioz, Elgar and Brahms did not quite ignite as it could have.

Neale's curt, often brutal directions made Berlioz' Roman Carnival nervier that it should have been. The famous cor anglais solo, beautifully delivered by Joy Liu, was peremptorily treated; fiery sections seemed to be perilously adrenalin-driven.

Elgar's Enigma Variations would make demands on the most experienced orchestra and the NYO fared magnificently after only a week together.

Neale's approach was highly idiosyncratic and some variations fared better than others. The first, a portrait of the composer's wife, showed the conductor's ability to draw passion from his young players and, in the closing phrase of the Nimrod, that demanding diminuendo, was acquitted with professional ease.

It was these more reflective pages that revealed fine soloists among the orchestra, in particular violist Amanda Verner.

Fast variations tended to be too fast. The second became a blur of string tone, and the allegro di molto of the eleventh felt uncomfortable.

Too often, important details were sacrificed, such as the surging violin scales in the finale.

Brahms' First Symphony set off with a good deal of promise, striding with purpose over Sarah Trenwith's deliberate timpani strokes.

But problems emerged. The 6/8 allegro did not have the sense of urgency required - a jog it is not. Neither was the woodwind dialogue in the "development" totally convincing.

By the second movement the strings proved they could carry the emotional weight that Brahms demands, with leader Julia McCarthy contributing a rapturous solo.

By the finale, with the brass coming forward in resplendent chorale, the symphony was given the ecstatic peroration that the programme note - beautifully written by violinist Marcel Fernandes - had promised.