What do you get if you combine projection screens with assorted hats, animal noises, and a Brahms symphony? Answer: the latest outing from the Aurora Orchestra – an ensemble that likes to do things differently.
First up was Richard Ayres’ so-called “animated concert” No 42 (In the Alps). The piece is a sort of Peter and the Wolf for the Wes Anderson era, complete with a tragicomic narrative displayed in intertitles and projections of kitsch Technicolor Alpine scenes, a hyperactive, post-minimalist orchestral soundtrack, and a soprano and a trumpeter cavorting as star-crossed lovers. Mary Bevan (playing a girl taught to sing by animals) bleated and grunted, squeaked and whistled with virtuosity and an impressively straight face. Christopher Deacon’s lederhosen-clad bugler made a swift transition from blowing raspberries into piccolo trumpet pyrotechnics. Under its principal conductor, Nicholas Collon, the orchestra also provided its own attention-grabbing solo turns, including an unforgettable exchange of de profundis growls between contrabassoon and contrabass clarinet.
After the interval, Brahms’s Symphony No 1, Op 68 was far from Ayres’ self-conscious silliness – though in the orchestra’s latest performance from memory, Collon’s breakneck speeds did at times approach an almost cartoonish freneticism. Yet as the strings were reborn as an army of massed, swaying soloists, the entire ensemble largely pulled together rather than apart. Entries were bold, pianissimos icy, the orchestral sound an extraordinarily well-shaken cocktail. Glances and grins flitted constantly across the stage as Collon (visibly enjoying himself) drove ever onwards to the fourth movement’s exhilarating climax: a final tumult of irresistibly, irrepressibly energetic playing.
