Car cette partition est un véritable délice… et on ne peut que rendre hommage à la superbe interprétation qu'en fait l'Orchestre de l'Opéra de Lyon, sous la direction toujours aussi efficace d'un Scott Stroman parfaitement dans son élément. Le plaisir que les musiciens prennent à jouer est palpable depuis le public.

Stroman, an accomplished jazz musician and teacher, led an invigorating musical performance: even seemingly throw-away numbers, such as "Catch Hatch," were thrilling here. Doubtless it helps that the Opera orchestra is accustomed to varied repertoire, but Stroman really liberated these players. They delivered a loose, high-spirited reading, while managing to bring out the melancholy and urgency that make ths work so compelling.

It is easy to sympathise with those who take a gloomy view of the future of classical music. Given the pervasiveness of “celebrity culture” and the vapid frenzy which attends fame, regardless of achievement, the unique challenges and benefits of great music can seem redundant, especially to young people.

But anyone prone to such foreboding would have been heartened by a recent concert at St. John’s Smith Square by the London Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. Comprising some 75 players aged 18 to 26, the group had never met before the five days of intensive rehearsal culminating in the performance. In addition, the programme selected by conductor Scott Stroman was no easy amble through a grove of chestnuts. Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste and Stavinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements are two of the most demanding works in the 20th-century repertoire, and between them came a masterpiece with its own distinctive challenge – the classic suite from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess arranged by Gil Evans for trumpeter Miles Davis, which produced one of the immortal jazz recordings.

Mr Stroman’s programming was canny: not only did these works illustrate different aspects of modern orchestral music, but they gave the separate sections maximum exposure – strings and percussion in the Bartok, brass and wind for the Evans, an ensemble of the whole for the Stravinsky. But any sense of abstract curiosity in an interesting academic endeavour was swept away the moment the LPYO began to play. This was simply a superb concert, thrilling masterpieces masterly performed.

Encouraged by Mr Stroman’s clear beat and relaxed authority, the players entered fully into these diverse worlds. The Bartok – mysterious, organic, endlessly surprising – must seem to be playing itself if it is to be played at all. Stravinsky’s “War Symphony” is hard-edged and noe-classical, its strident outer movements contrasting with the odd Rococo calm of its Andante. But the Gil Evans Porgy and Bess represented perhaps the severest test of all to the players largely unfamiliar with jazz. Yet, under guest conductor Joe Muccioli, the LPYO ensemble conveyed both the subtleties of swing and the gorgeous impressionist textures Evans called “clouds of sound”, which provided a perfect foil for his great original collaborator, Miles Davis.

At St John’s, the soloist was the excellent American trumpeter Marvin Stamm, who impressed everyone with his creative virtuosity. And his impromptu remarks were a fitting comment on the whole evening. Praising the quality of the LPYO and the London Philharmonic’s youth initiative, he noted that very little like it existed in the States. He only wished every American orchestra would undertake such a programme, because, he said: “The future of music in your country and mine depends on people like these”. One felt that if the future really was in the hands of the likes of the LPYO, it was a cause for rejoicing.

Recorded in one of Miles Davis’ most productive periods, in 1958, Porgy and Bess proved such a commercial success that Columbia tried to persuade the trumpeter to repeat his collaboration with the arranger Gil Evans on the music from another hit show, Doctor Dolittle. “No way, Jose” was Davis’s response; Sketches of Spain was to be the pair’s only wholly satisfactory subsequent project, and their interpretation of Gershwin was never performed in its entirety, its score lost until last year, when it was unearthed in a New York warehouse.

The impact of the piece’s introductory selection, Buzzard Song, was therefore considerable at Porgy and Bess’s first complete live performance in Britain at the Barbican Hall. In the Guildhall Jazz Band, comprised of jazz and classical students, both the more straightahead jazz material and the delicate tone poems found subtle yet vigorous interpreters. Evans’s trademark sonorities, using a combination of three french horns and tuba with muted trombones, or piquant mixes of flutes and muted trumpets, were reproduced with great accuracy.

It was the American trumpeter Randy Brecker, however, who was the main focus of attention. Eschewing the softer toned flugelhorn in favour of open trumpet, he did not attempt to reproduce the haunting, vulnerable sound of the original. Instead, he used his more robust approach to great effect on garrulous visits to Summertime and It Ain’t Necessarily So, and played the piece’s most adventurous arrangements, Prayer (Oh Doctor Jesus) and Here Comes the Honey Man, and the opera’s celebrated ballads with restrained power and elegance.

This concert was a triumph for Scott Stroman’s students and for Brecker, but, most important, it helped to establish a true jazz classic in the music’s live repertoire.

When Gil Evans and Miles Davis set out to create an instrumental jazz version of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, they were still aglow with the warm critical response to Miles Ahead, the orchestral suite with which they realised the promise inherent in their brief initial collaboration in the late forties. In Gershwin’s folk opera they found material destined to exalt composer, arranger and soloist alike.

In 1958 Davis was at his early peak, his playing marked by a beauty of tone and a perfection of line which brought him the affection of an audience far beyond the regular jazz constituency. His use of fugelhorn in place of his usual trumpet for most of Porgy and Bess merely enhanced the almost unbearable loveliness of his sound, while Evans’ orchestrations, which could be lean and unsentimental or warmly seductive, provided a matchless setting.

For many years, however, this was destined to be music with no life outside the recording studio. Only on a handful of occasions were Davis and Evans provided with sufficient funds to perform their collaborations in concert. By the time the value of their music became clear even to the most dim-witted promoter, both men had moved on, so the initiative shown by Scott Stroman and the jazz orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in searching out Evans’ elusive manuscripts and preparing them for concert performances results in many kinds of stirred emotion.

If it is asking a great deal of student musicians to live up to such a legacy, then their pleasure in the privilege of inhabiting the structures of this music was easy to appreciate. But can its spirit be inhabited by any group of musicians not under the direct control of Gil Evans? This is the sort of question confronting all those who wish to make a living repertoire out of the music of the great jazz composers of the past.

So faithfully and sensitively did the orchestra perform the suite, all the way from the fevered fanfare of “Buzzard Song” to the jaunty farewell of “There’s a Boat That’s Leaving Soon For New York”, that the highest possible compliment would be to say that there were moments when the music seemed to be playing itself, reanimated once more by Evans’ unique spirit. All the trademarks of colour and texture were given full value: the weightless woodwind combinations, the calm French horns , the quick stabs of muted brass, the daring use of unison tuba and double bass as a combined lead voice.

And in the impossible role of Davis himself, the veteran American trumpeter Randy Brecker gave a skilled and generous interpretation – a little more prone to displays of virtuosity and self-conscious bluesiness than Davis himself, perhaps, but if this music were about exact imitation then it would have no value. A labour of love then, and received in kind.

The string ensemble OPUS 20’s enjoyable concert under Scott Stroman at St. Giles, Cripplegate, also included a world premiere: Chroma, by the Bristol-born composer Dudley Hughes (b 1968). The densely but tellingly scored movement for solo quartet and a further seven players lights up the traditional English string fantasy (Vaughan Williams, Tippett) with a wealth of interior nuance. Sometimes the mellifluous idiom is lightly peppered with dissonance; sometimes the first cello will strain expressively into a high register. The players are instructed to use “hardly any vibrato”, but it is a richly sonorous music for all that, 12 minutes of steady efflorescence. Bradley Creswick was a fine pyrotechnical soloist in Paul Patterson’s 1992 concerto for violin and strings, an expertly written three-movement piece with an accessibility and poignancy not unreminiscent of Malcolm Arnold.

To end the programme came Britten’s overwhelming Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937), the 13 players standing (except for the cellos and bass), Stroman conducting (from memory) with zest and even a touch of magnificence.