Winter concert reviews!

Here's what the critics made of our well-received concerts in Liverpool and London.

Conductor Paul Daniel
Cello Natalie Clein

Mark-Anthony Turnage Hammered Out
Elgar Cello Concerto
Walton Symphony No 1
Anna Meredith HandsFree

 Liverpool Echo – Catherine Jones
“The youth of today get a bad rap. But the NYO, all 164 of them, are representative of the silent majority of decent, polite, hard-working and talented kids. The ‘made in Britain’ programme was chosen to play to their strengths – a heart-thudding level of sound you can only get with massed ranks that include 29 brass players, 14 double basses and seven percussionists among them, but also control and delicacy, and above all youthful energy. In Anna Meredith’s Handsfree, part of the 20x12 commissions for the Olympics, the players become percussive instruments themselves, their rhythmic clapping and vocal ‘shum’ and hum rising from knees to torso to head, with a sway, a slap and a click of the fingers. Clever, intricate and impressively done from memory.”

 The Guardian – Tim Ashley
“A piece for orchestral players but with no instruments sounds like a perplexing contradiction in terms. Pitched somewhere between classical and performance art, it's essentially a work about body percussion, fantastically planned and choreographed. It's a tour de force for the NYO, who performed it from memory and were greeted with a standing ovation, richly deserved. Natalie Clein was the declamatory yet lyrical soloist in the Elgar, a performance that was admirably unsentimental if a bit deliberate and over-controlled. The Walton, though, was wonderful. Like HandsFree, the piece is rooted in rhythmic complexity, and the performance generated a comparable sense of edge-of-your-seat excitement. Daniel shaped it superbly well, and the playing was outstanding.”

Classical Source blog – Colin Anderson
“Fresh from Liverpool, Paul Daniel and a fired up National Youth Orchestra (including piano, a couple of saxophones, bass guitar and plentiful percussion) swaggered through syncopations and changes of time-signature, totally immersed in Turnage’s clangourous, gawky and rowdy euphoria. After the interval there was a simply stunning – tension-filled and incident-packed – account of William Walton’s celebrated First Symphony. This was the NYO playing like a coiled spring. Paul Daniel was a master of the piece and of the NYO, a prime example of living the music and being attentive to his young charges. [It]… bristled with energy and heartache, impulses and opened-out rhetoric. The players were at-one with Walton’s emotional outpouring, the large number of strings producing tone of depth and lustre, yet never overpowering the woodwinds. The scherzo was fully Presto, with plenty of the requested malice, too – and superbly incisive timpani. With the slow movement, launched by a very expressive flute solo from Luke O’Toole, Daniel traded Andante for a daring adagio, the suggested-melancholic music ebbing and flowing … sentimentality avoided. The coda faded to absolute silence – a wonderful moment – out of which Daniel conjured the blistering finale.”

The Independent – Edward Seckerson
“[Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Hammered Out is] a brute of an opener for 165 feisty youngsters to do business with and they whacked out its streety vamping with a whole lot more grungy intent than the BBC Symphony did at its shaky Prom premiere in 2010. The second half of the concert delivered in spades. Getting this juggernaut of a band around Walton’s First Symphony can be no mean feet but Paul Daniel pulled it off, harnessing all that brass power (three monster bass tubas) towards ever more seismic climaxes and revelling in the diabolical tattoos of a terrific timpanist in the scherzo. How strangely exotic the flute-led slow movement sounded after that. You don’t usually dare follow Walton 1 but not every Handsfree set is attached to a mobile phone and, with instruments dispensed with, Anna Meredith’s wicked closer had the NYO players clapping, slapping, beat-boxing their way to the Cultural Olympiad.”

The Times – Richard Morrison
“The year is only a week old, but I will be amazed if I hear a more original orchestral piece in 2012 than Anna Meredith’s HandsFree. Although written for the National Youth Orchestra, it doesn’t use a single instrument. Instead, it requires the 150 NYO members to clap, click, stamp, sway, beatbox, hum and growl. It’s a bizarre but exhilarating ten-minute exercise that’s a bit like synchronised swimming without water, or a North Korean gymnastic displays without the totalitarian ideology. Some observers worry that such “gimmicks” are distracting the NYO from its core purpose of training Britain’s best young musicians to play orchestral repertoire at the highest possible level. The NYO’s next project — a collaboration with the folk band Bellowhead — hardly offers reassurance. But I found Meredith’s piece not only mesmerising, but as good a demonstration of the NYO’s teamwork and virtuosity as the feisty if rather hard-driven performance of Walton’s First Symphony that preceded it. And the concert, conducted by Paul Daniel, also included a beautifully nuanced performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto from Natalie Clein, as well as Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Beyoncé- infused stomp Hammered Out.”

Evening Standard – Barry Millington
“With Walton's Symphony No. 1 we heard what the orchestra was capable of and it was exhilarating. Sheer weight of numbers (10 horns, eight trumpets and seven each of the winds) produced the necessary tone, while Daniel was able to galvanise the players with machine-gun rhythms and tension-filled climaxes. The orchestra then put its instruments down for Anna Meredith's Handsfree, a piece that combines intricate clapping rhythms, beatboxing techniques and "body percussion". Commissioned as part of the New Music 20 x 12 scheme to feature in the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, it gathers momentum with cleverly choreographed routines, impressively memorised by the NYO players. Useful as a warm-up piece, at least, for musicians and athletes alike.” Sunday Times – Paul Driver “The NYO was conducted with his usual gusto and intelligence by Paul Daniel, whose authority in Walton’s Symphony No 1 is well attested by a Naxos recording, and who was able to ensure that this enormous body of young musicians (none above 18) brought the huge score to life with due vehemence. There was little in the playing to make one bear in mind the age of the musicians, neither here nor in the first half’s performances of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s rambunctious (Beyoncé-inspired!) Hammered Out and Elgar’s sublime Cello Concerto, with the eloquent soloist Natalie Clein.”

The Telegraph (HandsFree feature) – Peter Stanford
“Alongside works by Elgar and Walton, the orchestra premiered HandsFree – by the highly feted young composer Anna Meredith – in Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall last week to a standing ovation. Later, Devlin confesses, they also gave an impromptu late-night performance at an M6 service station on their way to London. They are certainly a joyful sight – altogether more theatrical and visually compelling than any orchestral concert I’ve ever seen.”

Telegraph journalist Peter Stanford also had a go himself at HandsFree, with some expert tuition from two of our players. Click here to see how he got on...