Page 71 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

14 September 2020

Beethoven from memory at the BBC Proms

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By Rohan Shotton

The 2020 BBC Prom season’s much-curtailed Beethoven tribute consists of the Third and tonight’s
Seventh symphony, plus a few sundries. Tonight’s Prom reflected on hearing loss, with Aurora
Orchestra applying their characteristic memorisation abilities to scintillating effect.

Nicholas Collon

© BBC | Chris Christodoulou
After a crackly Gramophone extract from the Heiligenstadt Testament, a Richard Ayres world premiere
opened the concert with a haunting reflection on deafness. Ayres’ own notes for his Three pieces about
Ludwig van Beethoven reveal it as a confrontation of his own hearing deficit. As such, each of the three
movements (“dreaming, hearing loss, and saying goodbye”) sees the music disrupted by an insidious
replication of a hearing disorder. In the first, the rich, vibrato-laden threads of sound had no sooner
coalesced into a dialogue across the expanses of the RAH stage, than they were swept up into the
tinnitus-like buzz of high strings. Hearing loss was distressing in its distorted, synthesiser-driven
cacophony. Further warped Gramophone contributions took the piece to its close. It was difficult
listening – as it should be – but grippingly effective and ultimately tragic.

The great man’s Seventh Symphony was prefaced by Nicholas Collon and Tom Service dismantling and
reconstructing the piece. Some interesting features were drawn out, but at times it threatened to feel
like a GCSE music revision guide, and the insistence on proclaiming the rhythmic cells of the first and