Page 76 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

Every orchestra has been undone by this experience. Not all have managed to
adapt. The BBC Concert Orchestra delivered a charmless account of the overture
to The Merry Widow, while the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment pluckily
fielded a first violin section full of current and former leaders as subs for an absent
Alina Ibragimova in three double concertos with Nicola Benedetti. The Vivaldi
sizzled and the Bach fell flat. All were in D minor. At least the Symphonic Organ
Prom was fun, and learning about “thumbing down” from the organist Jonathan
Scott was a pleasant distraction from the dumbing down elsewhere.

With the Chelsea Pensioners deployed as human shields against accusations of
unpatriotic wetness, a mile or so from the Albert Hall, the Last Night of the Proms
was a panicked exercise in trying to please everyone except the people who
regularly listen to the Proms. Coles and Andoh were on site with Derham and the
pot plant, while Lesley Garrett, Mel Giedroyc, the footballer David James, and the
hip young jazz pianist Jacob Collier and his mum were live on video, bobbing
along to the Hornpipe. The atmosphere was of a county-level Eurovision contest
minus the camp and the internationalism. Where is Graham Norton when you need
him?

The odds were stacked against music-making of substance, though the conductor
Dalia Stasevska located something precious and cool in Sibelius’s Impromptu for
strings and the attractive flutter of Golda Schultz’s soprano wove a heady, flowery
spell in Susanna’s aria from The Marriage of Figaro. Errollyn Wallen’s lovely
arrangement of “Jerusalem” was followed by Parry’s original, as though to silence
complaint. That the BBC Singers sang “Rule Britannia” to an empty hall under
pressure from the Prime Minister is a mighty metaphor for where we are at this
stage of the culture war.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t need gushing guests or footage of cows in
pasture. The most respectful treatment, from the lighting and the camerawork to
the expert presentation and commentary from Suzy Klein and Odaline de la
Martinez, was reserved for the most musically ambitious and refined concert of the
season, a journey through spatial soundworlds of the sixteenth and twentieth
centuries with space for reflection on the shared histories of the Proms and the
London Symphony Orchestra.

Directed by Simon Rattle, with cori spezzati of brass instruments in the galleries
and Mitsuko Uchida at the piano, this programme of Gabrieli, Elgar, Beethoven,
Kurtág, Adès and Vaughan Williams explored the full potential of an empty hall,
filling the space with layers of Venetian gold, drawing the ear in to intimate
fantasies for strings and meditations for solo piano, locating flecks of recorder,
harmonica, cimbalom and the lustre of an impassioned tutti sound in