Page 21 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

But if things aren’t too bad for Collon, he fears for fellow musicians who are
considering retraining.

“A high proportion of players have no salaried job and now have few performing
opportunities. A lot fell through the cracks of government schemes. Even if we get
some performances this autumn they are going to be small scale with 40 rather than
90 players.”

The father of three jointly started the orchestra in 2004 after leaving Cambridge, as a
means of drawing together “a wonderful generation of players to play at a really high
level.” When in 2014 they had to learn a “crazy piece for the Proms with the
performers on click tracks moving around the space” it sparked further
experimentation with a series of Mozart concerts.

“They couldn’t hear or see each other and had to play from memory. It was really fun
and wonderful so we thought ‘what could we do next to experiment with playing from
memory?’.

The preparation is “challenging” and involves months of learning music that is often
unmemorable - fine if you are playing the melody, but a trumpet part between two
notes is “a bit like learning binary code”.

The pay off for a player is “like seeing inside the composers head.”

And for him: “It’s having an orchestra that’s absolutely inside the piece. It brings
different levels of communication between players and a physical and emotional
freedom.”

For concert-goers it makes the experience “visual as much as aural”.

“It’s so moving and exciting for audiences to see musicians communicate with each
other, and visually it’s a very different thing to have an orchestra not buried in our
music stands looking at the notes.”

Aurora Orchestra play the West Handyside Canopy in King’s Cross on September 7
at 6pm and 8.15pm.

The BBC Prom is live on Radio 3 on September 10 and on BBC4 at 7.30pm.

https://www.auroraorchestra.com/event/beethoven7outdoors/