Sonic youth

Everyone knows — don’t they? — that the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain is the UK’s youngest world-class symphony orchestra — an ensemble of musicians aged 18 and under that’s the equal of any professional band (and better than some). But it’s also the largest, and we don’t hear enough about the sheer sonic impact of hearing 157 musicians moving with absolute precision. Even the smallest gesture by an 87-player string section has a sort of heft, a physical weight and depth that you can sense in the air around you. Overwhelming when the whole orchestra is playing at full power, it’s even more tangible in quiet passages, as if you’re in the vicinity of some vast, invisible living creature.

It was a neat idea, then, for director Daisy Evans to make the orchestra into a character in the NYO’s concert staging of Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, namely the massive, semi-sentient presence of the Castle itself. The stage directions ask for it to give ‘a cavernous sigh, like night winds’, so Evans had the orchestra’s members produce the sound themselves, with hands over mouths. Neon cables snaked between the players’ chairs, glowing blue for tears, yellow for gold or red for blood. Robert Hayward as Bluebeard repeatedly turned and surveyed the immense forces behind him, shoulders slumping, and when the Third Door revealed his treasure-chamber, players lifted their instruments up to glint and sparkle in the coloured light. The surtitles were accompanied by drawings of doors by Chris Riddell, and unnamed members of the National Youth Theatre enthusiastically declaimed the opera’s spoken prologue.

It looked striking, as far as it went. With Rinat Shaham standing in as Judith at short notice, and (perfectly understandably) singing from a music stand while Hayward performed entirely in character, you had to wonder if the original intention hadn’t been to go quite a bit further.