Sinfonietta - Seoirse Bodley
Symphonic Dances from West Side Story - Bernstein
Rite of Spring - Stravinsky
The National Youth Orchestra is in the middle of its 30th anniversary celebrations. Following appearances in Limerick and Dublin, the young players will head off on a tour to Germany and the Netherlands, with concerts in both countries' capitals, as well as at Expo 2000 in Hanover.
In Berlin, the orchestra is taking part in a month-long festival, in which youth orchestras from around Europe will celebrate the legacy of the 20th century in programmes which will each include a new work by a composer from their own country. Seoirse Bodley's specially-commissioned Sinfonietta is the NYO's choice. It was premiered in Limerick on Monday, and heard for the second time in Dublin the following night.
Bodley, like his near-contemporary John Kinsella (both men are in their late-60s), is a composer who has stepped back over, or, if you prefer, simply moved beyond the avant-garde style he was employing a quarter of a century ago. Bodley may not have reached as far back as Kinsella, but there's something of the atmosphere of mid-century American music about the new Sinfonietta.
It's not a connection to be taken too far, however, since Bodley retains something of the fragmentation and gestural thrust of the avant-garde style. But now, dressed in the intervals of a different harmonic world, the actual notes seem almost too tame, inadequate to their task. There's a curious restriction of temperature about this music, as about other works of Bodley's that I've heard over the past decade or so, that remains puzzling.
The NYO's performance under En Shao was, if anything, on the careful side, an indication, perhaps, of the dangers that lurk for performers in so much contemporary music. By contrast, the Symphonic Dances from Bernstein's West Side Story and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring were taken as a clear invitation for all concerned to let their hair down.
Riotous energy was the salient characteristic in both performances, with enough good playing - especially from the strings and, rather more forcefully, the lower brass - to point up all the more the weaknesses that surfaced periodically in some sections of the orchestra and also, more generally, in some sections of the pieces. But I don't think I've heard a more explosive Rite, since the possibly record-breaking assault on the piece by what was then the European Community Youth orchestra back in the late 1980s.
