Details of the 2011/2012 season announced and find out how you can get involved

The National Youth Orchestra of Ireland’s upcoming season offers unrivalled opportunities to learn and perform great symphonic music with new friends. Along the way you will be mentored by some of the finest professional orchestral musicians in Ireland and work under the baton of professional conductors.

Talking about conductors, yesterday, listeners to RTÉ lyric fm's Lunchtime Classics were given a preview of what is to come for the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland in their 2011/2012 season. Liz Nolan interviewed Zoe Keers, General Manager of NYOI, and Lukas O'Brien, oboist with NYOI and announced the very exciting news that Principal Conductor of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Alan Buribayev, is to conduct NYOI next summer! Buribayev's wonderful insight into Russian repertoire will make the learning and performance of Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 an incredible experience for Ireland's finest young musicians.


NYOI is proud of the thousands of young musicians who have graduated through our orchestras over the last 41 years and this year we are delighted to welcome back three NYOI Alumni of outstanding promise: Brian O’Kane (cello), Fiona Kelly (flute) and Jean Kelly (harp).

Sisters Fiona and Jean Kelly look forward to returning to NYOI next summer, this time as soloists in Mozart's Concerto for flute and harp. Fiona Kelly, who has been hailed by the New York Times as a player with “impressive technique and elegant musicianship”, recently completed her Master’s degree at The Juilliard School, New York, studying with Robert Langevin. Fiona won first prize in The Juilliard School Flute Competition and performed Bernstein’s ‘Halil’ with The Juilliard Orchestra conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky at The Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, Lincoln Center. Jean Kelly leads a busy life as a professional harpist. Jean regularly tours with the Locrian Ensemble performing harp concertos and her own arrangements of Irish music and has recorded three CD's with the group. In 2011 Jean was invited to Dublin to play for the historic visit of HM Queen Elizabeth II. She has also played at Buckingham Palace for HRH Prince Charles' birthday and has played harp on several film scores including 'The Lord of the Rings'.

The first NYOI meeting of the season will take place, as usual, during the Christmas holidays. A new group of young musicians will once again start the season under the baton of NYOI's wonderful conductor Gearóid Grant to prepare for a performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Bruch's Kol nidrei with cellist Brian O'Kane. A busy soloist and chamber musician, Brian came to prominence by taking first prize at the Windsor Festival International String Competition and is also a former prizewinner of the Haverhill Sinfonia and Royal Overseas League Competitions. In early 2008, Brian won the Prince’s Prize of the Worshipful Company of Musicians and is a former winner of the Accenture Bursary Award and Camerata Ireland Young Musician Award. In that same year, Brian performed with Camerata Ireland in Dublin’s National Concert Hall under Barry Douglas and with the Philharmonia Orchestra at Highgrove before the Prince of Wales. He recently appeared again with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Vladimir Ashkenazy at the 2009 Windsor Festival.

NYOI's 2011/2012 Season promises to be the pinnacle of orchestral experience for young musicians ages 12-18 in Ireland. From exciting repertoire to inspirational conductors and soloists who started where you are - what are you waiting for?! Applications for audition open on Monday 5th September and close on Monday 17th October. Application forms will be available from our website on Monday 5th September.

We look forward to receiving your application!

Guide to the Orchestra by Cian Ducrot

As the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland filed onto stage on Friday and Saturday night they just kept on coming... 94 players, 14 sections and over 25 different instruments...

Here is Cian Ducrot's guide to the orchestra (MTV cribs style!)

Guide to the orchestra "MTV cribs" style from NYOI on Vimeo.

How many clothes can a musician wear?

Read our website and you will be amazed and possibly shocked to discover that 93 teenagers can rehearse intensely for 8 hours a day on a week long course. Further shocking statistics include the fact that these teenagers are interested in watching a DVD of the Berlin Philharmonic performing Mahler Symphony No. 1 (after rehearsing it for over 8 hours that day). They are quite simply the most awesome group of teenagers. Despite their commitment and dedication to music, they are also infectiously fun! You can’t be around them and not smile! Come to their concerts and they will literally blow you away

http://www.nyoi.ie/events/event/summer-2011-nyoi-under-18s/

BUT this blog is all about showing you the other side of NYOI…

Like the students of Hogwarts in Harry Potter, NYOI were sorted into teams at the beginning of the 2011 summer course. While the famous Hogwarts artefact, “the sorting hat”, magically determines which house each student belongs to in Harry Potter, a person’s choice of instrument has determined which team they belong to. Often, instrument choice reflects a person’s personality… but we’ll delve into that a little later in our Guide to the Orchestra.

For now all you need to know is that the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland has seven teams competitively vying for “house points”: 1^st violins, 2^nd violins, violas, cellos, basses & percussion, woodwind and brass.

Each musician can gain or lose points for their team based on their punctuality, participation, working cooperatively with fellow musicians, following instructions or completing tasks on time. As well, points may be gained or lost for their team based on achievement in evening activities such as sports, entertainment and downright crazy stuff… including…

Check out this short clip of teams competing for the title of "Team that can collectively wear the most clothes!"

Untitled from NYOI on Vimeo.

Can you Handel this?

There is of course always the compulsory table quiz during the NYOI course... but these days the correct answer is just at the touch of an iPhone... so we wanted some "outside the box" thinking, some imagination and creativity and here are some of the best bits!

Draw a picture of a three-legged ostrich race...

Come up with a musical pun...
You can't Handel this
We're bringing sexy Bach
Your pp is too big
The horns violated the cellorando soh the conductor gave them a Hayden
Playing soft is not your forte
If you can't find someone to sing with you, you've got to duet by yourself


We are working on a brilliant Guide to the Orchestra video blog... stay tuned!

Love from NYOI x

Summer Proms 2011

NYOI's final activity for the 2011 Season is just around the corner. Next Saturday, 25th June, 93 young musicians will descend upon Kilkenny College for the Summer Course. A week of intense rehearsal will be led by our fantastic group of professional musicians and conductor Garry Walker.

Follow our blog as we promise to entertain you throughout NYOI's week of rehearals.. and until then, why not book tickets to one of our concerts!

Wish you had been there?!

Let the video load, turn up the volume and enjoy this 3 minute clip of NYOI's tour of the UAE!

NYOI tour of the UAE from NYOI on Vimeo.

A talented Dubai student reviews talented young Irish musicians

Irish youth concert underlines Dubai's multicultural good fortune
Living in Dubai, one gets used to its vibrant, multicultural spirit. On March 17 – the Irish feast of St Patrick’s Day – our school secured invitations for its music students to attend a concert by the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland.

It struck me how fortunate we are, as a group of young people from all over the world, to be able to celebrate an Irish national holiday with traditional music while in a country in the Middle East. There probably aren’t very many cities where teenagers have the opportunity to interact with people from such varied backgrounds. The honeypot of musical, artistic, sporting and literary talent that the UAE is becoming presents us with the chance to grow into quite open-minded individuals, and most of us have no hesitation about joining in festivities with our counterparts from different parts of the globe.

One of our teachers used to be part of the Irish National Youth Orchestra when he was a teenager, so he was looking forward to the performance that night probably even more than we were. What I love most about classical concerts is just how deliciously posh they are, and even if you aren’t a particularly keen aficionado of orchestral music, it’s hard to resist an excuse to fish out your under-worn evening dresses from the back of the wardrobe.

The venue was the Madinat theatre in Souk Madinat Jumeirah, which I hadn’t visited before (anything housing boutiques outside the price range of H&M usually doesn’t feature on my mall radar). The least enjoyable bit of the whole excursion was getting there. Traffic on a Thursday evening is never exactly light, but taking half an hour to crawl about 100 metres was simply hair-tearingly frustrating, and I would not have taken it well had we missed the beginning of the concert; it upsets the balance of the programme completely. Our early start paid off, however, and we arrived with a bit of time to spare – just enough to have a look around the souq before the performance.

The magical Arabian Nights atmosphere was lovely; there were stalls where you could have your name written in sand art inside glass bottles, and shops straight out of Disney’s Aladdin. The souq was separated into areas with names such as “Bastakiya” and “Deira” – names of old Dubai neighbourhoods. I even got to pet a falcon which turned its beak up at me disdainfully as I tentatively poked its head with my index finger.
At the entrance to the theatre, about five people spent a good 15 minutes looking for my name in a five-page guest list they had, couldn’t find it, and with typical Irish goodwill, decided that the fact I had an invitation card was good enough and effusively ushered me through. For once, we had managed to procure seats right at the front. The theatre itself has decent acoustics, and it was stunning with its little Arabian embellishments. The feel of St Patrick’s Day, though, didn’t kick in until the orchestra had tuned up and launched into the first piece, Irish Destiny by Micheal O’Suilleabhain, conducted by Gearoid Grant.

The composer himself was at the piano, the sections were in perfect harmony with each other and it was all quintessentially Celtic. I had more than a few pouty “not fair!” moments because this didn’t happen to be just another famous national philharmonic orchestra – it was a youth orchestra. Which meant that all the members, except the pianist and the conductor, were aged 12 to 18 years and they were all nauseatingly good, and you can’t use age as an excuse to explain away why they’re better than you.

There was a 15-minute interval during which I gulped down as many of what looked like pieces of chicken on crackers as I could; an hour and a half of listening to music helps you work up a healthy appetite. The second, shorter piece they played, The Brendan Voyage by Shaun Davey, featured Liam O’Flynn, captivating on the uilleann pipes.

It was, on the whole, a joyful mingling of cultures: the sense of pride the orchestra felt in bringing a piece of the Emerald Isle to a Dubai audience was palpable. Mr Grant, the conductor, was resplendent in a waistcoat with acid-green lining for a sense of occasion. The chairman of the ensemble, John Dennehy, smugly informed us that they had succeeded in getting a giant shamrock projected on to the Burj Al Arab.
It wasn’t just a musically enriching experience, but, for one enjoyable evening, gave us a taste of another way of life – and that’s not just a lot of blarney.

The writer is a 15-year-old student in Dubai.
This article was printed in The National (UAE's national newspaper) on 23 March 2011