Page 74 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

was announced, with a First Night commission for socially distanced orchestra and
choir.

More cuddly than Louis Andriessen’s The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven for
Promenade Orchestra and Ice Cream Bell (1970), less funky than Walter
Murphy’s A Fifth of Beethoven (1976), and spiked with a dash of folk fiddle and
accordion, Iain Farrington’s Beethoveniana was recorded by 323 musicians from
the BBC’s five in house orchestras and choir, and presented on July 19 with a film
of two dancers in front of video footage of Sir Henry Wood. So far, so W1A.
Despite enthusiastic pre-recorded messages from the Reverend Richard Coles, Jess
Gillam, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Adjoa Andoh, Dame Sarah Connolly, Sheila
Hancock, Simon Callow and Tom Conti, the contrast between Farrington’s peppy
mash-up and the broadcast of Claudio Abbado’s 2007 performance of Mahler’s
Third Symphony with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra that night was extreme.

By now the restrictions on outdoor performances had been lifted, seemingly in
reaction to guerrilla activity in London’s parks as a generation of opera singers
serenaded audiences under umbrellas. Concert activity resumed. Pilot
performances with reduced seating were announced at Wigmore Hall and Snape
Maltings, then postponed and announced again. Surely the largest concert hall in
the country could hold a reduced audience in safety? Apparently not. The second
First Night of the Proms, on August 28, was performed to an audience of three:
presenter Katie Derham, cellist and composer Ayanna Witter-Johnson and national
treasure Stephen Fry, perched on plum velvet accent chairs behind a perspex
screen, with a pot plant for company.

It’s curious how much an audience adds to a concert. Listening to the previous
weeks’ archive recordings on Radio Three, the fellow listeners from decades past
felt very present. Bodies change a building. They alter its temperature and its
acoustics. They amplify the seriousness and the joy. They tune in to the spirit of a
performance and assist in its broadcast. Yes, it was moving to see Sakari Oramo
and the BBC Symphony Orchestra play Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony after
months of silence. How could it not be? But the quieter moments in the programme
were more apt, despite the mawkish cutaways to photographs of empty streets in
London, Paris, New York and Rome. Copland’s Quiet City, played beautifully by
Philip Cobb (trumpet) and Alison Teale (cor anglais), doesn’t need illustration.
Directing the eye is one thing. Directing the imagination is another. If we are to
remember the dead, we should give them a Requiem. There are plenty to choose
from.

Inspired by a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, Hannah Kendall’s Tuxedo: Vasco ‘de’
Gama introduced a thread that ran unobtrusively through the fortnight. Skilfully