Page 26 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

many of his works. He would have loved this big bang of back-to-business. Inevitably circumstances made it
more a total experience than a chance to really assess what kind of an interpretation this was from Collon, how
the interplay of score-free players actually worked. That will be Jessica Duchen’s task when the performance
hits an (audience-less) Albert Hall for the Aurora’s Thursday Prom. The funnel-shaped covered walkway
between St Martin’s College of Art and the supermarket renders the sound both reverberant and very loud.
Woodwind tone could be piercing. Climactic moments like the reiterated pounding at the heart of the first-
movement development and the thunderous turns of the screw in the finale stood out in dance-revels which you
might like to hear rendered in crisper focus; the soft lower strings at the start of the Allegretto, the subsequent
long-term crescendo and the high, bright articulation of the scherzo worked best.
Yet all these varying levels of success were rendered insignificant in the general joy shared by young performers
so obviously delighted to be playing together and a wildly enthusiastic audience. The soul was truly fed, as it can
only be in a live event; the proof was in the enterprise. Much more of this, please.