There is something almost disarmingly sincere about youth orchestras; an openness of gesture, a lack of defensive irony, that makes them especially revealing in programs built around the idea of inheritance. The recent concert by the Giya Kancheli Tbilisi Youth Orchestra, under the direction of Valentin Uryupin, leaned into that idea with unusual clarity: three works, each orbiting the question of how music remembers, quotes, and reanimates its past.
The program itself looked, at first glance, almost pedagogical. Alfred Schnittke’s Moz-Art à la Haydn, Franz Krommer’s Concerto for Two Clarinets, and Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 95 formed a neat historical arc: postmodern fracture, Classical fluency, and then a return to the source. Yet in performance, the evening unfolded less like a survey course and more like a set of overlapping temporalities, where style became something unstable, almost porous.
Schnittke came first, and with him the ground already slightly unsteady. Moz-Art à la Haydn is one of those pieces that can easily slip into cleverness; its collage of Mozartian fragments, its theatrical interruptions, its cultivated absurdity all invite exaggeration. Here, the performance took a more restrained path. The two violin soloists, David Akopian and Teona Kelberashvili, played with a kind of dry wit; never quite leaning into parody, never quite stepping outside the idiom they were distorting.
What emerged was less a joke about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart than a slightly uneasy conversation with him. Schnittke’s method, quotation as both homage and sabotage, began to feel closer to something like memory itself: discontinuous, recursive, occasionally slipping into distortion. The orchestra handled the abrupt stylistic pivots with impressive discipline. More importantly, they avoided smoothing them out. The fractures remained audible, which gave the piece its necessary tension.
After that came Krommer’s concerto, which landed with a kind of polite brilliance, though now heard differently. Written on the edge of Mozart’s shadow, it demands not so much originality as fluency: an ease with symmetry, with conversational phrasing. Uryupin, who doubled as soloist alongside Marita Pataraia, approached it without fuss. Their playing favored lightness over projection, which worked in the hall’s acoustic: the lines felt less like declarations and more like exchanges overheard at close range. There was a subtle pleasure in the way the orchestra listened back, especially in the tuttis, where the young players resisted the temptation to inflate the music into something grander than it is. Instead, they let it remain what it wants to be: elegant, slightly mischievous, always in motion.
Only then came Haydn’s Symphony No. 95, and it might have seemed like a return to stability, but it didn’t quite land that way. Instead, it felt subtly altered—as if the listener’s ear, recalibrated by Schnittke’s interruptions, could no longer hear Haydn as entirely “original.” The symphony’s architecture, its balance, its rhetorical clarity, remained intact, yet there was a new awareness of its constructedness.
Uryupin’s reading of the symphony was notably unsentimental. Tempi moved forward with quiet insistence; phrases were shaped with attention to line rather than effect. The slow movement, anchored by its famous cello solo, avoided excessive warmth. It unfolded with a kind of inward focus, almost austere, which made its lyricism feel earned rather than given. In the finale, the orchestra found a sharper edge; articulation tightened, gestures became more pointed, and the music’s underlying humor emerged not as charm, but as precision.
What lingered after the concert was not any single performance detail, but a broader impression of listening across time. This is where the youth orchestra format becomes something more than educational: a space where tradition is tested in real time, where even the most familiar forms are heard as if slightly for the first time.
By Ivan Nechaev
