Michael Dervan reviews the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland at the NCH.

National Youth Orchestra of Ireland/Eddins

NCH, Dublin

By Michael Dervan

Gershwin/Bennett - Porgy and Bess, A Symphonic Picture. Ravel - Bolero. Nielsen - Symphony No 4 (Inextinguishable).

Think of an orchestra performing without a conductor and you'll probably gravitate towards something on the lines of a small chamber orchestra. But a band without a conductor doesn't have to be that small.

The conductorless Russian orchestra Persimfans was founded in the collectivist spirit of Moscow in 1922. With its players seated in a circular formation, it played new music well enough to impress the composers it featured, Prokofiev and Milhaud among them.

When Toscanini retired as conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the players reformed as the Symphony of the Air. Among their subsequent activities were conductorless recordings of Dvorák's New World Symphony and pieces by Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Wagner.

New York's 26-member Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1972, replicates the Persimfans model on a smaller scale, and has been so successful that it's attracted the attention of the Harvard University School of Business. It's even become the subject of a management book, Leadership Ensemble, Lessons in Collaborative Management.

For his début with the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland, William Eddins brought the unexpected spectacle of a conductorless performance of Ravel's Bolero. Well, a virtually conductorless one. Eddins set the tempo and then stood motionless - mostly on one foot, the other poised, toe to the ground -as the young players took their turns to shine in the work's long sequence of solos.

He rejoined the activity to bring the music to a close with swirling gestures.

Eddins, of course, had made all the contribution he needed during rehearsals. Judging by the results he achieves, it's his particular gift to enable musicians to play comfortably within their ability while at the same time surpassing what they normally do.

The effect was as clear in the flexibility achieved in Robert Russell Bennett's glossy orchestration of tunes from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess

as in the Ravel, delivered

straight and unfussy, just as the composer liked it.

Nielsen's Fourth Symphony, the Inextinguishable, is a work which, the composer explained, "is meant to represent all that we feel and think about life in the most fundamental sense of the word, that is, all that has the will to live and to move".

Eddins left a few unusual thumbprints of rubato on the piece. But in terms of energy, drive and exuberance, not least in the drumming of the two timpanists at either side of the stage, this performance lacked nothing.