Page 75 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

scored, Kendall’s watery surge of strings, bells and brass subsides as the fragile
keepsake sound of a little clockwork music box plays the melody of a slave song,
“Wade in the Water”. In London Sinfonietta’s Prom, Clíodna Shanahan played
Julia Wolfe’s East Broadway for toy piano, its brittle chimes struck in counterpoint
to the arcade game buzz of a boom box, a joyful miniature to the premiere of
Tansy Davies’s bold, hot, urban nocturne neon. In Salford, the BBC Philharmonic
opened their Prom with a Sturm und Drang overture to a puppet opera,
Haydn’s Philemon and Baucis, directed by John Storgårds.

Distancing measures make soloists of every player, regardless of nerve or
temperament, yet the BBC Philharmonic strings were immaculate in the milky
twists and tilts that run through Britten’s Nocturne. So darkly bright was Allan
Clayton’s singing with the seven obbligato soloists, so clear was his shaping and
enunciation of texts by Shelley, Tennyson, Coleridge, Middleton, Wordsworth,
Owen, Keats and Shakespeare, that the bland lighting of Media City did not
interfere.

This was not the case in Cardiff’s Hoddinot Hall, where the BBC National
Orchestra of Wales glowed uncomfortably under photo-booth lighting. A smart if
taxing programme of Martinů, Adams, Barber and Copland, conducted smartly by
Ryan Bancroft, deserved better visuals. Regardless, Gavin Higgins’s Rough
Voices, one of four new works commissioned to reflect on the Covid-19 crisis, had
passion and punch and produced a remarkably robust, energized soundworld from
reduced forces. Where Thomas Adès, Jay Capperauld and Andrea Tarrodi traced
journeys from darkness to light, Higgins raged at the cruelty of domestic policies
that compounded pre-existing inequalities. It was the closest to protest or critique
that anyone got in a fortnight of Keep Calm and Carry On concerts, though the
expression on the face of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s timpanist as he
doubled on sleigh bells in Capperauld’s Circadian Refrains (172 Days Until
Dawn) in the Glasgow Prom was something to behold.

Fresh from performing to audiences in King’s Cross and Saffron Hall, the Aurora
Orchestra delivered proper brilliance of sound in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony
and the premiere of Richard Ayres’s No 52 (Three pieces about Ludwig van
Beethoven, dreaming, hearing loss, and saying goodbye), a howl of grief
introduced by Paapa Essiedu’s narration of lines from the Heiligenstadt Testament.
Amid the Beethovenian rhythmic and melodic gestures, the sonic interference, the
drone and the screams, there is only one direct quote: a fragment of Für Elise that
features in one of the oldest viola jokes. The opening solo from the principal cellist
Sébastien van Kuijk was the loveliest of the season.