“A fearless start to the year that proved The National Youth Orchestra already plays with grown up confidence.”
I couldn’t have asked for a better way to begin the year than with the National Youth Orchestra at the Barbican. This was my first concert of 2026, and from the opening minutes it felt like a clean reset: ambitious, unapologetically demanding, and in a way risky. And then there was the thrill about knowing that what you are hearing is the result of barely a week’s work together. Most of us were still negotiating leftover chocolate and email inboxes at that point while those very talented musicians were building a full orchestral language from scratch and offering it up in public.
The programme, titled Shimmer, avoided any sense of post-holiday comfort listening. Instead, it leaned into heat, glare and movement, drawing heavily on imagined Spanish soundworlds filtered through French sensibilities. Debussy’s Ibéria opened the evening with fragmented rhythms, hazy colours, gestures that appear and dissolve before you can grasp them. Under Alexandre Bloch’s direction, the orchestra felt impressively contained for its size. There were moments where the texture thickened almost too much, but even then the playing retained a sense of intent rather than excess.
Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole followed, and here the orchestra seemed to relax into the music’s theatricality. The final movement, in particular, felt to me like it burst into life: brass was biting, woodwinds were flashing upwards, rhythms were into focus.
But for me the concert truly caught fire in the contemporary works. Karim Al-Zand’s City Scenes delivered a kind of neon confidence, jazzy, together with streetwise gestures in the orchestra. The energy felt modern without trying too hard to prove it, playful but in the sane time constructed with sharpness. The contrast with Anna Clyne’s DANCE brought balance. With cellist Inbal Segev at its centre, the piece pushed the audience through a series of emotional transformations. One moment the orchestra offered an almost baroque sound, the next it slipped into something closer to jazz or klezmer. The dialogue between soloist and ensemble was alive and flexible, and Segev’s presence grounded the piece with warmth and authority.
There were lighter touches too like the Autumn Leaves that spotlighted bassoon and tuba in ways that felt both cheeky and affectionate, and a final encore that tipped fully into joy. By the end, what remaind was not just technical accomplishment but a sense of possibility. Hearing an orchestra at the very start of its journey, still forming its collective voice, is rare. Hearing it sound this confident so early on is rarer still.
If this was the National Youth Orchestra’s opening statement for the year, it was a bold one. I left the Barbican energised, stunned, and very glad that this was how my musical calendar began.