Like the Vienna Philharmonic, the National Youth Orchestra has never bothered with a chief conductor, more than content with the succession of distinguished guests it has always been able to rely upon to lead its school-holiday rehearsals and concerts. Now, though, it has appointed a chief guest conductor, taking advantage of Yan Pascal Tortelier's departure from the BBC Philharmonic. Tortelier is conducting the Easter course, and will be in charge for the summer concerts, too, including the orchestra's Proms appearance; at the Barbican he showed intermittently at least that he knows how to obtain the best results from his young charges.
NYO typically goes in for large orchestral numbers, doubling and sometimes trebling the wind as well as bulking out the strings in an effort to include as many talented instrumentalists as humanly possible in the concerts; there are 160 players this time, and the aural sumptuousness they produce can be thrilling. This wasn't always the effect at the Barbican; it was fine to kick up a storm in Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony with a quartet of harps and a trio of tubas, but less convincing to thicken the woodwind lines and deaden the textures in Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, which is a far more economical score than its great climaxes might suggest.
Tortelier didn't help matters in the Sibelius by his fondness for very measured speeds. It's odd to get impatient with the slow burn of the opening movement of the Fifth, one of the most original conceptions in the symphonic canon, but Tortelier sometimes made it seem as if the journey mattered far more than ever getting there, and it even took a while for the giant clockwork of the finale to run smoothly, though the explosive impact of the double basses' collegno was far more effective than I have ever heard before.
The scale of Manfred was altogether better, though even here Tortelier was sometimes on the slow side - the picturesque scherzo was just a bit too neat and tidy, the "con moto" qualification added to the marking for the third-movement andante all but ignored. In the outer movements, however, the NYO produced its best playing of the evening, wonderfully well marshalled, velvety plush in its depth of tone. Manfred should be a seat-of-the-pants ride, music that pushes the expressive envelope right to breaking point; it never seemed that here, but just imagine the results if this wonderfully responsive orchestra were conducted, say, by Valery Gergiev.
· At Symphony Hall, Birmingham, tonight. Box office: 0121-780 3333.
