Prom 30: Alexandre Bloch conducts The National Youth Orchestra in Missy Mazzoli’s Orpheus Undone and  Mahler’s First Symphony; Tess Jackson conducts the world premiere of Dani Howard’s Three, Four AND … 

Richard Wagner
The Flying Dutchman – overture

Missy Mazzoli
Orpheus Undone

Dani Howard
new work
BBC co-commission: world premiere Conducted by Tess Jackson

Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 1 in D major

The National Youth Orchestra

Alexandre Bloch
conductor

Tess Jackson
conductor

The National Youth Orchestra’s visits to the Proms never let you down. With their massed ranks of strings, woodwind, brass and percussion, led this year by eighteen-year-old Rose Gosney from Southampton, one gets the classics on a gargantuan scale and the moderns with thrilling, sure-footed ambition. Ideally suited to the Victorian space and latterday acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall, the likes of eighteen cellos, ten double basses, eight flutes, ten horns, nine trumpets, eight trombones, three tubas, four harps and eight percussionists at full throttle create a massive Saturn V impact. 

Commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, premiered by Riccardo Muti in March 2022, Missy Mazzoli’s Orpheus Undone (2020) draws on material from her hour-long pre-Covid ballet Orpheus Alive. It focuses, she says, on “two brief moments in the Orpheus myth — the moment that Eurydice dies, and the moment that Orpheus decides to follow his lover into the underworld”. Exploring what she calls “the baffling and surreal stretching of time in moments of trauma or agony”, Steve Smith’s programme note advances the notion of time come unstuck, “sped up to a frenetic pace and slowed down to near stasis seemingly at once”. From the hypnotically  pulsing woodblock opening, through Stravinsky/Psycho stabbings, to closing whisper, “more aftermath than resolution”, the two linked movements – ‘Behold the Machine, O Death’ (long) and ‘We of Violence, We Endure’ (short), their titles from Rainer Maria Rilke’s metaphorical, post-Mahlerian Sonette an Orpheus – make for a gripping showpiece. The orchestration and solo detailing is assured, the music’s inner engine compelling. Stepping in for the originally scheduled Nathalie Stutzmann, her withdrawal from this Prom “due to scheduling difficulties”, Alexandre Bloch captained a characterful account, at one with the idiom and tensions of Mazzoli’s fantasy (if marginally holding back on the score’s initially ‘clock-like, snappy’ crotchet 128 tempo), his band of players, fresh from pre-runs this past week in Manchester and Saffron Walden,  responding viscerally to the challenge.

Dani Howard’s BBC/NYO co-commissioned Three, Four AND … (2024) raised the roof. A free spirit to watch – born in 1993 and raised  in Hong Kong,  she studied at the RCM between 2011 and 2015 – Howard has a string of high profile commissions and artistic collaborations to her name, her Trombone Concerto for Peter Moore of the LSO winning a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2021. This year she’s been the NYO’s Resident Artist, committed to “empowering young people, developing their creative music-making and providing them with a voice” (Craig West, the orchestra’s Programmes Director). These musicians, on and off-stage, she writes, “have inspired this work. Their energy, drive and ambition are contagious. During our spring residency,[they] came forward with ideas that they wanted me to include in this composition – all of which have been incorporated … everything from flutter-tonguing in the flutes to prominent viola parts.” Stemming from Howard’s As One  melody for the NYO, “played, adapted and morphed by people across the country”, Three, Four AND … (AND being the anticipatory “upbeat in music and dance”) resonates at all levels. It marches, stamps, sensualises, energises, spatialises, explodes in a cinematic kaleidoscope of colour, sounds and  associations. For twelve-and-a-half minutes, the writing is earthy, rhythmic and lush in its handling of forces and capabilities, the sign-off placed to perfection. Offstage – from all compass points of the hall in the ‘gods’, second-tier boxes, choir stalls, and four of the stall aisles – the As One tune intoned from memory by members of NYO Inspire (the orchestra’s in-depth initiative “to provide breakthrough orchestral music experiences to teenage musicians who are under-represented in the classical music sector [or] face barriers or a lack of opportunity in their music education”) cast a theatric spell. Credit for the performance must go to Tess Jackson, associate conductor of the NYO, making, like Bloch, her Proms debut. A Cambridge and  RAM graduate, studying with Sian Edwards as well as Semyon Bychkov, Mark Elder, Edward Gardner and John Wilson, she brought confidence, vitality, rapport, physicality and the clearest, most economical of beats to proceedings, not a moment fussed or confused, the forces before and around her – 260 players – synchronised and melded with democratic purpose, twenty beams of blue light framing the spectacle.

The roast beef of the evening was in Bloch’s hands, a rising French star who won the 2012 Donatella Flick Competition and was until recently music director of the Orchestre National de Lille. With such a large orchestra at his disposal, allowing us to hear details and inner lines in the woodwind and brass often lost, albeit sometimes at the expense of the strings (antiphonal violins), he went for ‘big’ readings of early period Wagner and Mahler. Taking time to settle, down partly to deliberating and prolonging transitions and  tempos, The Flying Dutchman (1860 revision), fine though the tuttis and woodwind harmonien were, was short on elemental freshness. (Maybe Karajan, Janowski – a 2017 outing  in Frankfurt – remain too imbedded in my conscience.) Micro-managed, spoon-fed  sectioning … preparations turned into ‘wait for it’ signposts … notes, phrases and joins sculpted scrupulously rather than hewn from nature … protracted paragraphing/en route cadences … transient strains of perfumed over-beautification likewise veined Mahler’s First Symphony (the 1899 version minus titles and ‘Blumine’ – music re-discovered in 1966 that first came my way a year later through Britten at Aldeburgh), threatening to fragment its torso. A young man’s symphony not especially sure of itself or its material, inclined to over-gesture, bombast around the corner, was every now and again how close it came to sounding. Not all was happy. Impressive, intense, moments nevertheless were to be had. The controlled quietness (barely audible) of the introduction for instance, strings at the edge of possibility. The massiveness and richly coloured sonority of the ensuing development section. The brazen (unexpectedly vocalised) reprise at fig 26. Silken Trio offsetting a rugged Ländler. The death-in-the-midst-of-life funeral march third movement. True, a twinned rather than single double bass take on the Frère Jacques ‘solo’, but at least not the entire section. The reedy Klezmer interpolations with their boxy ‘Mahler machine’ percussion backing (better ‘live’ than microphoned), breathing fin de siècle middle-European street-life authenticity. The Finale with its pageant of emotions, troughs and peaks, plenty of bass heavy gravitas when it mattered, glorious and visually dramatised by the end, decibels throbbing. Headiest of finishes.

For encore, the Provençal Farandole from Bizet’s second L’Arlésienne Suite. A brilliant, hair-flying  a cappella vocal arrangement – lusty, fluid, playful, talented, imaginative. Community dance, community song, communities united.