La Pri - Dukas Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini
Rachmaninov The Enchanted Lake
Liadov Concerto for Orchestra - Lutoslawski
The National Youth Orchestra of Wales, with a claim to be the oldest of its kind (it was founded in 1946), is certainly not lacking in a sense of adventure when it comes to programming.
The challenges of the programme it brought on its Irish tour to Dublin and Belfast on Wednesday and Thursday were many and varied.
Paul Dukas, composer of the ever-popular Sorcerer's Ap- prentice, was a fastidious craftsman and so self-critical that he destroyed much of his work before his death in 1935. This leaves the still rarelyheard Pome dans, La Pri, an intricate essay in oriental impressionism, as his last major piece, towering over the handful of other works which survive from the final decades of his life.
Conductor Christopher Adey's approach with his young Welsh players at the NCH on Wednesday was both tonally undernourished and expressively pallid. The exoticism of Dukas's background to the tale of Prince Iskander and the fairy, the Pri of the title from whom he steals the "flower of immortality", simply didn't materialise on this occasion.
Liadov's Enchanted Lake of 1909 is another work which lives or dies by the conjuring up of appropriate atmosphere, and Adey read it with the same awkward stiffness which he had brought to Dukas.
Lutoslawski's Bartk-influenced Concerto for Orchestra, delivered with unusually flat perspectives, carried a greater charge.
But the evening's main attraction turned out to be the fearlessly sturdy playing of the piano soloist, Gareth Owen, in Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini.