MUSIC / Taking it from the top: Keith Clarke watches the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain as it prepares to play at the Proms tomorrow evening

'Oh dear, is that photographer from the Independent wandering around out there? He's bound to find someone canoodling on the lawn.' With the sun high in the sky and 150 youngsters out to enjoy themselves, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain summer course is under way again. Whatever the delights of the lawn, the main activity is two weeks of intensive orchestral rehearsal culminating in tomorrow night's Prom, a performance of Alban Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra and Mahler's Resurrection Symphony.

To judge by the NYO's previous Proms - it has been giving them for almost 20 years and impressing audiences with performances of such glittering scores as Messiaen's Turangalila, Schoenberg's Gurrelieder and Stravinsky's Firebird - it will be a concert to remember, but for the players, it is an evening tinged with sadness. Although the concert is what they all work towards it also marks the end of a course which means a great deal to them.

'It's so sad,' says the orchestra's principal contrabassoonist Michael Mukhopadhyay, 'knowing that after the concert the whole thing breaks up and there are a lot of people that you won't see again. You walk out on to the stage of the Royal Albert Hall, with this marvellous audience there, and play the most emotional music. Everyone is crying at the end. One friend was so upset by it that he couldn't go back to school for a while.'

At a time when newspaper reports have most of the country's youth doing handbrake turns in knocked-off Vauxhall Astras or bombing out on Ecstasy, what is it about a youth orchestra that has teenagers queueing to give up two weeks of their holidays to sit in a warm hall playing classical music all day long before returning to their parents, as principal oboe Helen Moody puts it, 'with 'WOW]' written all over our faces'?

With instrumental tuition becoming increasingly sidelined by cash-starved education authorities, many young musicians find themselves isolated at school. 'You can easily get the notion that no one else likes classical music,' says Helen Moody. 'You feel isolated. But you come here to the NYO and it's cool. It's trendy to like classical music because you're all here to do it.'

The orchestra is formed just after Christmas each year following an extensive nationwide audition programme. It just manages to squeeze in a 10-day course after Christmas, with two fortnight-long courses in the Easter and summer holidays. All end with public concerts. Between the three courses the orchestra exists in name only. It speaks volumes for the consistent standard of the playing that the BBC, with the Prom, gives live network radio (and last year television) to a group of teenagers who had not even seen the music until two weeks before the performance.

About one third of the players go on to become professional musicians, but there is a general consensus that whether or not music is their chosen career, the NYO courses teach them life skills that will serve them well. 'It's not just for becoming a professional musician,' says Michael Mukhopadhyey. 'It's an education in self-discipline, training the mind.'

The players, currently aged between 12 and 20, have usually cut their teeth in county youth orchestras. The effects of the current education changes are a source of concern to NYO director of music Derek Bourgeois, who says the orchestra depends totally on good county youth orchestras to sustain the NYO at the top of the pyramid. 'At the moment it's not a problem, but we haven't seen the potential effect of what is going on at the moment. The next three years will be critical.' A more immediate effect is that with increasing numbers of self-governing schools, holiday periods have become much more varied, making it difficult to time the orchestral courses so that players do not miss days at school.

If the NYO relies on the co-operation of schools, it also needs parents who are prepared to fork out pounds 200 a time for courses. As tuition fees go, it is not bad, but as Derek Bourgeois points out, the parents already have the cost of the instrument and tuition, and probably other children in the family to support. 'I have long had a vision of being able to charge no fees, but sadly the NYO is virtually the only youth orchestra in the world that isn't properly funded.' For those parents who can afford it (and some bursaries are available), pounds 200 is money well spent to see their youngsters applying themselves to something worthy and coming back all the better for it. Derek Bourgeois retires next year after 10 years with the NYO, leaving behind a first-class orchestra (now with a chamber orchestra too). Plans for the future include Proms with Matthias Bamert next year (Mussorgsky, Birtwistle and Gershwin) and Mark Wigglesworth in 1994 (Daphnis et Chloe and Petrushka). The orchestra is also likely to be accompanying the BBC Young Musician of the Year final again in 1994.

The NYO is just like any other orchestra to run, says director of administration Michael de Grey, 'except that when you're running a professional orchestra you haven't got parents ringing up all the time.' Of the 150 players, only 60 are over 18, so the NYO administrators find themselves in loco parentis to 90 energetic teenagers. As a sort of acting headmaster to the group, Michael de Grey makes sure that everyone's behaviour is up to scratch, and smiles as he remembers the evening when the tutors were having a nightcap, only to be admonished by a group of players from the over-18 group. 'They asked if we could keep the noise down - we were keeping them awake.'

The players work in sections with tutors for each instrument during the first week's rehearsals, with the conductor taking a full orchestral rehearsal in the evening. In the second week they work as a full orchestra most of the time. The conductor for the summer course and Prom is Tadaaki Otaka, who has been pleasantly surprised by the standard of playing. 'Before I started, I thought maybe they could play the Mahler but the Berg is very hard. After the first rehearsal I realised they would play it better than a professional orchestra.' It may sound a bit like hype, a conductor talking up his band, but Otaka is serious. By the standards of professional orchestras, the NYO's rehearsal time is the stuff that dreams are made of. 'With a professional orchestra, some things are impossible, because of the rehearsal situation. They can play it, but it is not music.'

Otaka is known in Britain as principal conductor of the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra during a period in which its reputation has risen sharply. He splits his working life equally between Japan and Britain and although he has conducted the CBSO and the Halle he is rather an unknown quantity away from Wales, something which does not bother him too much, he says, underlining a commitment to the BBC Welsh until at least 1995. Otaka was introduced to the odd ways of the British after a concert in Bangor when, during a late-night whisky with his wife in their hotel bedroom, there was a bloodcurdling scream from below. He was just about to call reception when the orchestra manager rang to tell him not to worry, it was just an Agatha Christie murder game in progress. 'This is something we do not have in Japan,' he says drily.

A popular choice with the young NYO players, he speaks warmly of their flexibility and their ability to understand music very quickly. 'Adults must trust young people,' he says. 'If we trust them their response is beautiful.'

(Photographs omitted)

National Youth Orchestra, Causeway House, Lodge Causeway, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3HD (0272 650036). Keith Clarke is editor of Classical Music