Page 15 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

No, it's actually a relatively recent development: we gave our first concerts in 2005, and the first one
we did from memory wasn't until 2014. We like to remind people that it’s one aspect of what we do,
but it’s certainly not the ne plus ultra - in a normal year, only about a third of our performances involve
memorisation. It’s a vehicle, a means to an end, and it allows us to do rather interesting things, but it’s
only part of how we try to achieve that end.

Were any of the works on the album recorded without music?

Just the Mozart: I think it’s probably the first time that a big-scale piece like the Jupiter has been
recorded like this, because on the face of it it seems like quite an obtuse thing to do! We did it not so
much because we wanted to make a statement, but just because we’d been playing it like that
anyway in concerts, and it would have seemed like a step backwards to go and pick up the music –
none of the players wanted to do that, so we kept it as it was! For the Richter we used the music: we’d
actually performed it from memory only the week before, but it would have been a nightmare to record
like that because it’s very hard to stop and start in that piece. And I certainly wouldn’t like to do the
Adès off-copy!

What struck me about your recording of the Jupiter was how clearly a lot of the detail in the
inner parts comes across: do you find that different elements of a score perhaps come to the
fore when you're rehearsing a piece off-copy?

It’s always difficult to say what is down to what, but I think working from memory does allow us to
explore elements of the music in greater depth than we would be able to do with the notes in front of
us. Perhaps that’s partly just because the sheer amount of time we spend on a piece when we work
like this means that we hear and feel things we might otherwise miss, but it’s also because there’s a
certain freedom for the players that comes from performing from memory. Dispensing with the music
certainly isn’t a prerequisite for finding interesting things in a Mozart symphony - it’s important to point
out that some of the best orchestras in the world, and the best recordings, achieve all of this with the
copies in front of them! - but I think that we all feel that it gives us a sense of cohesion and
improvisatory freedom that we wouldn’t otherwise have.

You’ve done a few concept albums with Aurora, including Road Trip back in 2015: how did you
hit on the idea of the 'Music of the Spheres'?

That came from our Creative Director, my wife Jane Mitchell, who’s also a flautist. We did
the Jupiter at the Proms with Aurora in 2016 and wanted to revisit the piece because it’s just great fun
to play, so we used that as a tangential jumping-off point for doing something around the idea of the
heavens and the Music of the Spheres; the Adès, which is another piece that we’ve long wanted to
play and record, seemed to fit quite naturally into that, so it all came together quite organically. I love
Tom’s music, and I first conducted Concentric Paths with Pekka [Kuusisto] and the Philharmonia
around eight years ago, but it was in my consciousness already - Jane had played it with the
Chamber Orchestra of Europe and I remembered her practising the piccolo parts endlessly because
they’re extremely difficult! It’s a great work-out for all the musicians, actually, because it’s very
challenging: it’s a wonderful, virtuosic, expressive piece.

The Richter is a new commission for this project: what was the collaborative process like for
this?

We spoke to Max about the concept of the album, and also suggested that he might try and write a
piece that we could manage to play in the dark, which he really liked! So he went away and came up
with this idea of the Pulsar CP1919, which was discovered in the 1960s and sends a signal back to
earth every 1.3373 seconds. He decided to use that as a base-point from which different parts of the
string section would play various extended rhythmic values, all cleverly knitted together with
ascending scales – the sonority and texture are amazing. That started the concerts from total
darkness, with the space imagery coming up on the screen behind and the lights on the floor flickering
one beam at a time; it was really very beautiful.