Shimmer Review – The National Youth Orchestra welcomes the new year in elegant and engaging style | classical music

IIt is rare to hear an orchestra’s first public performance. It is rare for this performance to take place approximately a week after the players meet for the first time. But that is a seemingly impossible demand for the teenagers in the National Youth Orchestra, which begins its annual session in earnest just after Christmas and is preparing to tour three UK cities before term. It’s a strong start to the year for anyone whose post-celebration accomplishments were largely dependent on the couch.

Indeed, Shimmer for 2026 is less festive glow than urban heat haze, inviting us into the sun-bleached Spanish streetscapes of Debussy and Ravel, writhing with dances, festivals and life.

First performed in 1910, Debussy’s Imagined Spain in Iberia is a delicate pointillist affair – a collage of muted colors and scents. Some of the works are swollen by the extra weight of the NYO’s doubled – and often tripled – powers, but while conductor Alexander Bloch kept his massive ensemble under absolute control (this is, after all, Spain through unmistakably Gallic eyes) there was still a sense of painting additional layers in watercolour. The rhythms shook, often smearing the sinuous range that extended the inviting hand in the first movement.

It was a similar story with Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole, which was at its best in the swirling rhythms and celebratory release of the final movement: finally caution rushed to the wind, the brass roared and rattled, and the woodwinds shot skyward like fireworks.

Two contemporary works saw the group come into its own. Bernstein’s raucous neon glow in Karim El-Zend’s 2006 “City Scenes” introduced a new swagger, a cheeky little phrase that leapt around the orchestra like a masterful vocal dribbler, strings and harps on bright paper over brass and woodwinds in the street. The contrast with Anna Klein’s radiant, Rumi-inspired Dance (2019) – a cello concerto in all but name – was dramatic. Accompanied by Inbal Segev’s convincing cello singing, the orchestra reflected its changing mood: now a mannered baroque ensemble, now a klezmer or a jazz ensemble – conductor Aki Blindis and chief cellist Charlotte Schlomowitz each sing in duet with Segev.

Add to that an opening set of “Autumn Leaves” (providing bassoon and tuba solos we never knew we needed) and a lively encore of Rossini’s William Tell Overture (bold: not sung), and we had some sense of the breadth of what these teens embarked on this week. By August, they will be flying.

The Shimmer tour continues on January 5 at the Warwick Arts Center in Coventry, and on January 6 at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham.