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Review: An Orchestra of Teenagers, but No Apologies Necessary

Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America at Carnegie Hall on Thursday.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America
NYT Critic’s Pick

There’s a delicate balance to the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, an educational initiative and touring group organized by Carnegie Hall with late-teenage players. Right down to the outfits: Black blazers connote professionalism, while bright red slacks and low-top sneakers suggest a calculated casualness. (“Hey, we’re just kids here!”)

But something unexpected happened for me during the middle of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2, performed by the ensemble under Michael Tilson Thomas on Thursday evening at Carnegie Hall. I forgot I was listening to teenagers. Instead, I was concentrating on the work’s brooding transitions, and thinking about the second movement’s route between delicate pizzicato phrases and heights of bombast. You didn’t have to make the usual youth orchestra apologies: This was creditable as a richly imagined, fully professional performance.

This Sibelius symphony was once pilloried by the critic Virgil Thomson as being “vulgar, self-indulgent and provincial beyond all description.” But more recently, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard used a tantalizingly brief excerpt from the symphony’s first movement in his 2014 3-D feature “Goodbye to Language.”

In that film the fragment feels like a distant yet treasured memory of pure Romanticism — a state of mind Mr. Godard suggests is no longer accessible to us after the horrors of the 20th century. The National Youth Orchestra’s performance succeeded in evoking this intense emotional range. There was a lightness of step in that first movement. And there were deep reserves of tragedy in the second. The journey to major-key triumph in the finale felt less tacked on than it sometimes does.

This poise was audible throughout the evening. In the premiere of Ted Hearne’s “Brass Tacks,” commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the orchestra gave a crisp reading of a piece with diverse influences. Mr. Hearne is an heir to the Post-Minimalist tradition. He also, in a program note, cited contemporary “hip-hop of the South” as an inspiration. But only rarely did I hear the persistent, percussive edge of contemporary trap music styles.

The closer point of comparison seemed to be mid-period John Adams, thanks to vaulting themes that were frequently, daringly interrupted and recalibrated, all without losing a sense of forward momentum. (Last year, under the conductor Marin Alsop, the National Youth Orchestra players tackled Mr. Adams’s “Short Ride in a Fast Machine.”) Without sufficient precision, this type of rhythmic instability can get muddy. But Mr. Thomas and the players sounded cleanly confident in a vibrant work.

Similarly sensitive was Gershwin’s jazz-informed Piano Concerto in F, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist. I’m afraid I’ll never hear this piece in the same way after Aaron Diehl’s bravura (and partly improvised) performance with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic in 2016. Mr. Thibaudet had less of the bluesy intensity that Mr. Diehl brought to Gershwin’s middle movement. But the suave elegance of this take was also compelling, thanks in part to the orchestra’s principal trumpet player, Forrest Johnston, who earned a substantial ovation for his second-movement solo.

Carnegie’s attention to American swing will have another outlet with the debut of a new ensemble, called NYO Jazz, on July 27. And a younger group, NYO2, will also make a Carnegie appearance, on July 24. These should both prove well worth hearing, given the high standard achieved by the flagship National Youth Orchestra: no grading-on-a-youthful-curve necessary.

National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America
Performed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: They Make You Forget They’re So Young. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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