Youthful talent abounds in National Youth Orchestra

By HEATH LEES

The way Brigid O'Meeghan hears it, Kiwi music talent gets younger and better every year. She should know. A cellist with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, she also has the annual task of putting together the National Youth Orchestra.

Last week she was auditioning in Auckland, last stop on a countrywide scouting mission for the current crop of most talented under-25s.

Auckland has been providing more and more players, but since the major NZSO resources are in Wellington, only the keenest supporters have made the trip to hear the orchestra perform. It's nearly 10 years since they played in Auckland.

That will change this year with the whole orchestra coming up by bus after the August 31 concert in Wellington, to perform the same programme at Auckland's Town Hall on Sunday, September 2.

Aucklanders will be able to show their pride for their own. Out of a total of nearly 200 applicants, 62 of them are from this region. Another source of Auckland pride will be the featured soloist, Justin Bird, who has been in the NYO's viola section in previous years.

Many of his orchestral partners didn't even know that the 17-year-old violist is a star pianist, already the winner of most of the country's top piano awards, including one sponsored by Kawai, who gift-wrapped a grand piano and gave it to him as a prize.

O'Meeghan says that Bird, a pupil of Bryan Sayer at the School of Music, will play as soloist in a spectacular item by Chopin and might even, if he's recovered, join the violas half-an-hour later for the final challenge of Prokofiev's fifth symphony.

Such embarrassment of talent in one young performer doesn't surprise the NYO's co-ordinator, who notes that youngsters these days are becoming gifted on two, sometimes three instruments, often at an early age.

"It gives you hope," she says brightly, "not just for New Zealand, but for the human race."