Arts: Who says the young aren't Romantic?

WHAT HAVE Jonathan Coffey, Naomi Hazlett, Jonathan Deakin, Kate Andrews, Ben Morrow, Kate Milne and Heidi Sutcliffe in common?

Well, precision, intelligence, talent, commitment for a start. For these are all members of the magnificent National Youth Orchestra, star turn of last year's Proms, which has just got 1999 off to a bumper start with concerts in Symphony Hall, Birmingham and Manchester's Bridgewater Hall, where they played last night.

This was a programme that might have warmed the cockles of Sir Simon Rattle, himself a percussive former member of the orchestra: Wagner's "Prelude" and "Liebestod" from Tristan Debussy's La Mer, Strauss's "Death and Transfiguration", and (with close repeated to rapturous waves of applause you could feel heaving, Wembley-like, round Symphony Hall), Ravel's "La Valse" - the apotheosis of not just the Viennese Waltz, but of almost everything.

So much impresses about this 150-strong mass of fledgling virtuosi - some of whom may well, in time, form the core of our principal orchestras. First, as conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier pointed out, these gifted youngsters have a mere nine days to amass a programme, making phenomenal demands on musical precision. The thoroughness of their preparation, and their practical and instinctive grasp of giant-scale late Romantic scores (they take Mahler in their stride), is breathtaking.

Furthermore, they reveal a dynamic grasp not just of microscopic finer detail but in a macrocosm too, mastering massive structures that could, otherwise handled, be diminished to thin rhetoric.

Lovingly nursed by Tortelier, these cheerful prodigies encompass Wagner's taxing, long flowing epic lines like fully-fledged professionals; likewise in the Debussy, with its endless surge and ebb and flow highlighting individual sections - trumpets (marvellously lucid), full brass chorus (top-notch), the gorgeously intoned, soaring solo violin of leader Jonathan Coffey or the seabird cavorting above the foam of flute, piccolo, clarinet - there was much that shone. The opening bars, with their whisper of four beautifully focused harpists, the initial leaf-like rustle of strings, and the first hint of trumpets, was as magical as the finale was deafening; while from the exquisite opening of the Strauss on second violin and violas - a vast harmonised sea of strings heaving dead together (the later scudding fast passages in first and second violins were equally finely co-ordinated) - you might think we had a budding LSO on our hands.

Just here and there inexperience showed - a slight languidity in the full wind chorus, some string over-relentlessness prior to the bewitching close of the Strauss. But any temptation in rehearsal to rush the "La Valse" was triumphantly resisted in performance. From a dense score sprung a wealth of instrumental clarity (low-rocking bassoons, horns, bass clarinet, trumpets 1+2, eight-strong varied percussion) and a joyous nonchalance. Nobody fluffed. And no-one was late at the dance's dazzling demise.

Roderic Dunnett