Yahoo Finance BBC Young Musician 2020 final review – a golden year
Whether you attribute the mood of heightened emotion to the effects of lockdown, or to the exceptional quality of the playing, the 2020 BBC Young Musician final stood out as a golden year – even in the absence of a live audience. The three who made it to the last round – 18-year-old Annemarie Federle (French horn), 19-year-old Ewan Millar (oboe) and 17-year-old Fang Zhang (percussion) – have had to wait over a year for this grand denouement because of Covid. Virtuosic, poised, unflustered, they all deserve major careers.
One pleasure of the final is seeing these young players encounter a professional symphony orchestra. Even reduced and distanced in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, the BBC Philharmonic showed its responsive qualities, with conductor Mark Wigglesworth demanding but sympathetic with the soloists. Federle’s performance of Ruth Gipps’s Horn Concerto, with its ferocious, huge leaps and cascades of high notes, dazzled. So too did Millar’s exemplary, richly shaded account of Legacy, a concerto by Óscar Navarro. The prize went to Fang Zhang, born in China’s Henan province and a recent student of Chetham’s School of Music, Manchester. His thrilling but expressive delivery of Prism Rhapsody for marimba, by the Japanese composer Keiko Abe, showed the utmost control and elegance. Modest in manner, poetic and disciplined in gesture, he has consummate musicality: worth watching just to catch that winning hint of a smile as he nears the breathtaking end. He got my vote.
BBC Young Musician, which has taken place biennially since 1978, has sometimes felt out of sync with modern life. No longer. There’s a welcome freshness about the TV presentation, excellently anchored by Anna Lapwood and Josie d’Arby, with help from the saxophonist Jess Gillam, 2016 finalist and woodwind winner, and star oboist Nicholas Daniel, who won in 1980. Together they offered maximum knowledge and enthusiasm with minimal gush – no mean feat.
