Page 58 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

years ago. Yet apart from one playful hint of Für Elise and some Eroica-style crunch chords,
there were few overt references to Beethoven in the three movements.

Indeed, the Viennese masterpiece evoked at the start was the sublime slow movement of

Schubert’s Quintet in C, with a cello tracing a noble, wistful line against sustained string chords.

Gradually, though, the sweetness soured, the violins became decoupled from each other, the

tonality disfigured.

You suddenly realised that, as with Smetana’s extraordinary string quartet, From My Life, Ayres

was intent on showing us exactly how hearing deterioration affects how a composer experiences
his own music. That feeling of disintegration, of inner and outer ears becoming unhinged,

continued in the second movement, where a jazzy keyboard solo was increasingly punctuated by

accelerating shock chords and then smeared with heavy breathing, as in a panic attack.

In the finale a clever metaphor completed the process. Here the music harked back to Ayres’s

usual cartoonish zaniness. Every now and then, however, the orchestra stopped and the passage
it had just played was repeated, but through the pretaped crackly distortion of a 78rpm record on

an ancient gramophone — its horn inevitably evoking the deaf Beethoven’s ear trumpets.

Here was the composer demonstrating that he can still write invigorating, apparently high-

spirited music, while also indicating how painful that music sounds to him. Unbearably

poignant, yet also indefatigably stoic. Beethoven would have recognised a kindred spirit.

After that, Aurora played Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony from memory, with exactly the same

vitality and vigour as it had in the semi-outdoor performance I reviewed earlier in the week, but

this time with the textures crystal-clear. A magnificent achievement.

Available on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds