‘Ascent” is the title for the National Youth Orchestra’s current tour, and the dominant theme is mountaineering, at once taken literally and as a metaphor for artistic aspiration and striving. Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, pitting man against the impersonal magnificence of nature, is the main work, to which the evening’s curtain raiser, a new piece by Dani Howard, also called Ascent, forms a response. Separating them is Smetana’s great depiction of the river Vltava from Má Vlast, marking the bicentenary of the composer’s birth which falls this year.
Mark Elder, himself an NYO bassoonist in his youth, conducts the Strauss and Smetana, though Howard’s Ascent, for brass and percussion, is done conductor-less, its progress measured out by woodblock taps from one of the percussionists standing centre-stage. The work echoes the Alpine Symphony both in its near-cyclic shape and in Howard’s self-conscious adoption of some of Strauss’s more startling effects – the murky, slowly accumulating dissonance at the start, for instance. One of her aims, however, is to bring on stage the vast quota of horns that Strauss leaves off it, lining them up in formation across the front of the platform and allowing them to kick off the very un-Straussian central section with its jazz riffs and big-band sound. The scoring was occasionally monochrome, though the NYO brass clearly had great fun with the work.
Vltava, in contrast, focused attention on woodwind and strings, with gracefully duetting flutes at the start and a gorgeous sheen on the violins in the section depicting the water nymphs of Czech folklore. The sonic weight conferred by the NYO practice of doubling or trebling parts made the score sound darker and more Wagnerian than it usually does, which Elder to some extent countered by propelling things forward with understated urgency.
That sheer density of sound, however, proved close on ideal for the Alpine Symphony, its prevailing grandeur thrown into relief by the delicacy of those passages where Strauss turns his colossal orchestra into the most refined of chamber ensembles. Elder was in his element in what proved to be a monumental account of the work, the NYO’s commitment and enthusiasm tangible in playing of formidable virtuosity and intensity.