Page 16 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

I'd gathered from photos of the live performances that you did some interesting things with
lighting and spacing...

We performed it in Singapore, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and a few regional venues in the UK
including Birmingham Town Hall, and it took quite a long time to set everything up! We created a
bespoke lighting installation on the floor which looks like an old map of the spheres, from back in the
day when people believed the earth was the centre of everything and all of the other planets radiated
outwards. Jane had been studying one of these old maps and noticed the similarity with many modern
concert-hall stages: if you look down on a venue like the Kölner Philharmonie or the Berliner
Philharmonie from above, you see that they’re also built around concentric circles which the orchestra
falls into almost exactly, so it’s quite a nice image.

In the concerts we had a birds-eye video-camera which was able to project what it all looked like from
above onto the wall behind us, and we fitted the orchestra within the illuminated lines of the Music of
the Spheres map. The idea was that where I stood represented the earth, with all the planets/players
spiralling outwards, which also ties into Adès’s idea of 'Concentric Paths' very neatly! In between the
pieces we talked a little about the Pythagorean concept of the Spheres, exploring the relationship
between music and maths and astronomy: for example, we took the four-note fugue in the last
movement of the Mozart and demonstrated how it works mathematically, which was a nice way of
drawing the whole concept together.

How have you connected with your audiences during lockdown?

We’ve launched a big online initiative called Aurora Play – we’re very fortunate in that we’ve got a
huge archive of digital content, including a lot of BBC Proms which were broadcast on TV, and we
were able to secure the rights to stream them. (I think that’s a first from the BBC, and they’ve been
very good about it!). So rather than streaming (which is still quite difficult to do on this scale), we’ve
focused a lot of our energy on bringing this high-quality archive material to people’s attention, and
also packaging it up differently by doing things like dancing and drawing videos around it to draw in
younger audiences. It’s proved really popular, and from the organisation’s point of view it’s been a
great way to expand the profile of what we’ve done so far.

It occurred to me that Aurora's history of playing with space and distance in your concerts will
put you in quite a strong position when it comes to resuming live performances – is it still too
early to discuss possibilities on that front?

Yes, we probably are fairly used to it, because when we play from memory we do quite a lot in
unusual formations, and we’re very happy to be distanced: in our concerts we usually do an encore
where we go and stand among the audience - very far apart! – so they can feel what it’s like to be
inside the orchestra. I’m not saying that would be possible now, but it does show what you can do
with pretty complex music spread around a large concert-hall. So I’m not particularly concerned about
playing in a socially-distanced way: the real issue is the restrictions on numbers of players. At the
moment [this interview took place in July] Public Health England is saying that we can only have eight
wind and brass-players, and that’s not enough for a Beethoven symphony…They plucked that figure
absolutely out of the air, and all the orchestras are completely hamstrung by it.

Postscript: Earlier this week it was announced that Aurora will give their first public performance
(and one of the UK’s first orchestral concerts) since lockdown on 7th September: Beethoven’s
Seventh Symphony, performed from memory, under the West Handyside Canopy in King's Cross in
partnership with Kings Place. They will perform the same work, alongside a new commission from
Richard Ayres exploring Beethoven’s journey into deafness, at the BBC Proms on 10th September;
the concert will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, BBC TV and BBC iPlayer.