{TABLE} Sigurd Jorsalfar Suite ............... Grieg Poeme ................................ Chausson Clarinet Concerto No 2 (exc) ......... Weber Symphony No 7 ........................ Dvorak {/TABLE} IT'S not often you hear the players of an orchestra cheer a conductor walking on to the stage at the start of a concert. But the Junior National Youth Orchestra did just that for Gearoid Grant at the National Concert Hall on Sunday.
The animation of the young musicians' response found its way into the playing, too, as Grant led off with a highly coloured account of Grieg's Sigurd Jorsalfar Suite. The high points of this performance were the hushed, pianissimo start of the second movement, Borghild's Dream, and the beautifully judged passages for four solo cellos in the third, the Homage March.
Aileen Dullaghan, the violin soloist in Chausson's Poeme, has been studying (under Ernst Kovacic) and working in Vienna for the last few years. Her playing has matured and settled remarkably during that time, and she dealt with challenges of the Chausson in an efficient, matter of fact way.
Clarinettist Carol McGonnell a finalist in this year's RTE Musician of the Future Competition, chose a brisk pace for the alla polacca finale of Weber's Second Clarinet Concerto. She negotiated the tricky twists and turns of Weber's writing with musicianly skill and handled the vertiginous roulades at the end with especially impressive aplomb.
It would be idle to pretend that the playing of this junior orchestra (with members aged between 12 and 18) fully rivals the accomplishments of its senior counterpart (where the age range is from 18 to 24) - differences in the security of intonation are alone enough to see to that.
Yet Gearoid Grant has been able to forge in the junior group's playing a particularly enjoyable vividness of expression, home of his facility in generating high levels of thrust without undue forcing and in creating the sense that he has brought his musicians very close to their collective potential.
