Every young musician’s audition is watched and adjudicated by specialist teachers and music tutors for your instrument.

Auditions are then moderated by our Programmes and Orchestras Manager alongside a lead music tutor for your instrument.

Things we look for:
1. That you are enjoying yourself and that you like making music
2. How you play in terms of your technique and facility like your phrasing, breath control (for wind players) or bow control (for string players)
3. That you can play your pieces really comfortably

We also take into consideration which orchestra you have expressed interest in: Orchestral Weeks or Orchestral Weekends or both.

Our priorities are to place children where they would feel most comfortable and confident and have the best possible experience. We also want to build strong, collaborative orchestras where members will both find huge enjoyment and where they will develop – musically and personally – through making music together.

We are sorry to hear you are disappointed with your result.

If you have not been offered a place in NCO for 2026, please remember that you did incredibly well to prepare and submit an audition – we know it’s not easy and you should be very proud of your efforts. We encourage all young musicians to keep going with their music – taking up opportunities with their local music hub, exploring all of the national organisations who support musical and orchestral learning and to keep in touch with NCO through our auditions mailing list to hear about future opportunities to audition and take part in our activities. You may be interested to keep an eye on our Orchestral Days page on our website, to see if opportunities are coming up in your area.

If you’ve got a place in NCO 2026 but it’s not the orchestra you were hoping for, you might like to look at our Orchestral Weeks or Orchestral Weekends pages on the website to find out more about the place you have been offered.

Both Orchestral Weeks and Weekends are auditioned, high quality orchestral learning opportunities. Members will learn from exceptional NCO tutors and be amongst some of the UK’s most remarkable young musicians and will meet friends, make music and have fun. Our orchestras are complemented by our online resources and events to prepare young musicians for in-person activity – particularly if they haven’t been away from home before – and to enrich their musical learning.

If you’re on a reserve list for one of our orchestras, please know that you did so brilliantly and there’s simply not enough spaces at the moment. Symphony orchestras are made up of sections with a certain number of places in order to achieve balance of the full orchestral sound, the size of the stages they perform on and more. We offer as many places in each of the orchestra’s sections as possible. Reserve places often become available when circumstances change for other young musicians, but we cannot guarantee that young musicians placed on the reserve list will get a place in one of this year’s orchestras.

Please note that our decision is final and we do not discuss individual results.

It’s fantastic that you would like to audition again next year. We have an auditions mailing list which parent/carers can sign up to, to be kept in touch with audition information e.g. when we are going to launch auditions, what you will need to do and when. You can sign up to our audition mailing list via the button below.

We hope to open auditions for NCO’s 2027 programme in the spring of 2026.