Eleven years is a long time when you're launching young talent on the world. Since 1999, BBC Radio 3's New Generation Artists have gone forth and multiplied. All the "graduates" have outstanding careers, and among them some of the names which will be most familiar with music lovers include trumpeter Alison Balsom, mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski and three of the world's most successful string quartets (Belcea, Jerusalem and Pavel Haas).
With a new intake of seven to the current 14 just announced, we had a chance to hear three of the group in action at the BBC Symphony Orchestra's home base in the Maida Vale studios on Tuesday. A fabulous opportunity for those lucky listeners who managed to get their hands on the free tickets; and an equally wonderful one for the young musicians who got to try out their new repertoire away from the glare of high publicity with the BBCSO and its masterly principal conductor Jiří Bĕlohlávek. The results will be broadcast on Radio 3 some time in January
The first of the trio was, for me, the most exciting. Like fellow Young Generationer Khatia Buniatishvili, Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi has the seal of approval of arguably our greatest living exponent, Martha Argerich (he appears annually at her festival in Lugano). Could it have been her advocacy that led him to play Richard Strauss's early work for piano and orchestra, the part-Brahmsian, part Till Eulenspiegelesque Burleske, an unusual component of Argerich's repertoire? At any rate, his measured but sparkling way with its many faces was perhaps even more enchanting than Arturo Pizarro's performance with the orchestra last season. And how he unleashed the double-octave frenzy towards the end.
Tenor Ben Johnson (pictured right by Chris Gloag) was a last-minute substitute for another New Generation Artist, soprano Malin Christensson. He took over a different selection of Mozart arias, the hard Maida Vale acoustics not exactly warming his full and far from cathedralish tenor. But he certainly got round the incredible difficulties of Don Ottavio's "Il mio tesoro" from Don Giovanni in high style.
Perhaps it didn't help that two-thirds of the Mozart strand was less than inspiring music. Two-thirds of the Dvořák Violin Concerto, too, is only fitfully interesting. But Veronika Eberle (pictured below by Bernd Noelle) sparked nicely with the BBC Symphony woodwind, and the finale took off as it can after rather too much Bohemian autopilot writing.
One thing's for sure: these three will all have major careers, too. The new intake which included Eberle also embraces 18-year-old pianist Benjamin Grosvenor and jazz saxophonist and clarinettist Shabaka Hutchings. All will be worth hearing. And you can encounter Grosvenor along with violinist Alexandra Soumm and cellist Nicholas Altstaedt in the next NGA concert at Maida Vale on 26 October. For details, go to the BBC Symphony Orchestra homepage or phone 0370 901 1227.
Watch Francesco Piemontesi play Debussy's "Les collines d'Anacapri" from the first book of Preludes:
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