Barely 15 years ago, Nicholas Collon was sitting among the viola section of the National Youth Orchestra. Now he’s on the podium, having established his own band, the Aurora Orchestra, as one of the most dynamic and unpredictable ensembles in the country.
That such fast-track success sprang from this remarkable pool of teenage musicians is really no great surprise. In its initial stages, Aurora was practically a NYO splinter-group in which Collon’s class of 2000-01 still form a sizeable number. And this year’s crop play with the passion, finesse and lack of inhibition that inspired him in the first place.
The orchestra got Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary off to a rousing start with Tchaikovsky’s 10-minute summation of the Bard’s longest tragedy. Although the Fantasy Overture: Hamlet has no delineated characters as such, principal oboe Eleanor Sullivan starred as Ophelia, with a plaintive, floating melody destined to drown within the murky depths of the brass. Tchaikovsky’s Shakespearean homage pays no obeisance to the structure of a conventional overture. Yet what could be a more fitting interpretation of the play than a tormented skein of music that has difficulty making its mind up what to do next?
As a large orchestra, the NYO can also be uncommonly loud, but Collon’s approach to Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony was about detail rather than decibels. He invested the massed ranks of young players with the same transparency he brings to the Aurora, creating a restrained sense of power that was never bombastic.
Lighter relief arrived with a Technicolor rendering of Korngold’s Violin Concerto that suggested the 19th-century romantic concerto never died but settled for a golden retirement in Hollywood. Soloist Tai Murray played with chandelier-swinging bravado which confirmed that, though Christmas may be over, pantomime season is still upon us.
