The Malta Youth Orchestra’s inaugural concert, held at University’s Sir Temi Zammit Hall, saw a fair turnout of patrons eager to discover what budding musical talent Malta has in store.
Many of the young musicians involved will perhaps move on to the philharmonic and thus the experience was a good opportunity to acknowledge a promisingperformance.
The programme began with Adolphe Adam’s overture from the celebrated opera-comique Si J’Etais Roi. Often overlooked, it was refreshing to see it so well-placed and the piece conjured memories of the wonderful choral number that follows it in the opera.
It was played with a necessarily light touch and while it took the orchestra a while to ease into things, once they got started the audience was offered a substantial interpretation.
We were then treated to Gluck’s overture from Iphigenie en Aulide. Anybody who has encountered the virtuosity achieved by Böhm in 1962 (recordings are freely available through online sources) will not be able to hear this piece without expecting a very fast tempo, and they are right.
Perhaps a slower attempt is more in keeping with the nature of the piece, as the overture to a tragedy.
But there’s no excitement quite like the overture transforming into an almost dance-like sequence, and perhaps this orchestra will one day be able to attempt something similar.
Mozart’s Symphony 28 was a brave choice that sometimes came together, sometimes floundered. It was the following piece, Albinoni’s Sonata in C (for trumpet and strings) that I was most looking forward to. However, as a fan of Albinoni I was not quite so overjoyed as I had hoped to be. Perhaps the trumpet player had other things on his mind that night, and after a few minutes I did too.
The evening ended with a rousing rendition of the Te Deum prelude and a piece of music from Gladiator by Hans Zimmer. This final piece was all fury – crashing, big and dramatic. It was impressive by sheer virtue of the sound achieved.
As a more contemporary work, it sat a little strangely among the other material but if the intention was to end on a resounding high, that was achieved. I couldn’t help but wish the orchestra had found a way of channelling the passion they obviously felt for their final piece into the rest of the concert.
Certainly the musical selection was ambitious. It must have been an exhilarating first taste of big-stage playing for some of the musicians, but when they began to take ovations after every piece and shuffled back and forth on a stage too small to make movement comfortable, there was a pervading awkwardness that might have been avoided.
Still, the conductor looked pleased with himself throughout.
The musicians achieved some very refined moments and there were times that the orchestra smiled when they knew it had, for that moment, all come together.
It will be interesting to see where the youth orchestra goes from here in presenting a new generation of Maltese musical talent to the public.