Page 42 - FINAL_Aurora Orchestra_Inside Beethoven Coverage Book

London's Printworks - setting for Aurora's experiment with technology, and
Beethoven (photo: Carolina Faruolo)
Since that first ‘by heart’ project, Aurora has performed over 10 symphonies in this

way, spanning well over 100 concerts all over the world. At the outset we didn’t
expect that the approach would become a hallmark of our work, but it soon became

clear that for special projects there were a host of artistic benefits to working in this
way. Freed from stands and scores we were free to experiment in new ways

with theatrical ideas in performance, as well being able to develop a completely new
kind of introduction to the music being performed. Most importantly we found that it
led to a higher quality of performance – memorising a whole symphony allowed the

orchestra to achieve a far deeper shared musical understanding than would
ordinarily be possible, heightened the sense of communication between and within

sections, and injected a wonderful sense of spontaneity and drama into each
performance. The orchestra has become so enthused about performing in this way

that these days we have even started applying the same approach to studio
recordings.

One of the things we’ve most loved doing with memorised performances is an
'immersive encore’: at the end of a memorised symphony, we send the players out

into the concert hall to play amongst the audience members in the auditorium.
People often tell us that this is a highlight of the experience for them – they love the

sense of being enveloped within the orchestra and getting up close to the musicians.
As musicians it’s wonderful to be able to convey the thrill of what it’s like to be

physically inside the living organism of an orchestra as it performs – this isn’t
something that you can usually share with an audience.

We’ve often wondered if it might be possible to take this ‘immersive’ idea further –
wouldn’t it be amazing to be able perform a whole symphony with the

audience inside the orchestra in this way? We’ve experimented with the concept
over the years, and have found it can work really well in small-scale settings such as

schools workshops or pop-up performances for audiences in unconventional spaces.
But when trying to develop the idea into a larger-format event with a bigger
audience, we’ve always run into technical challenges. If you radically expand the

orchestra’s footprint to accommodate an audience of even a couple of hundred, it
becomes increasingly difficult not just to find a venue of sufficient size to host the