<<< Back to News

The Times / Geoff Brown (March 2010)
Aurora Orchestra's 5th Birthday Concert at LSO St Luke's

There cannot be many concerts that open with a Gabrieli canzona and close with the Duke Ellington band's signature number, Take the A-Train. But diversity is the hallmark of Aurora Orchestra, formed five years ago by two Cambridge University friends, Robin Ticciati and Nicholas Collon. Ticciati's star has since risen elsewhere, but Collon remains, vigorously conducting fiery and pungent performances.

You could grumble about the over-elaborate frenzy of John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony, but never about the musicians' precision in mastering the score's bopping rhythms or stamina needed to run on the spot. The Gabrieli nugget was bouncy enough, boldly projected, with wondrously fleet violin figurations wafting up between chunky brass.

But these, and Britten's early and wiry Sinfonietta, were easily dwarfed by the main attraction: the mid-1960s inferno of Berio's Laborintus II, a fidgety, once-modish collage piece, commissioned to mark Dante's 700th birthday, with the poet's Hell reconfigured as modern capitalist society. The work is choked with a jungle of singers, intoning speaker, electronics, free jazz, madrigal echoes, and many nearly indecipherable words.

To make dramatic sense of it Aurora joined forces with the adventurous Mahogany Opera and its director Frederic Wake-Walker. Eleven singers in clinical white writhed and jittered: cliché actions, but transformed into magic by the web of light playing over their bodies. The staging's firm grip ran counter to Berio's vaunted multiplicity of sounds, but it made the labyrinth navigable and created memorable fusings of music and theatre. When Berio's score shook and quivered, lights quivered in sync: simple, but very effective. As a tape bombardment played out, lights played over the bodies on the floor.

Mahogany's singers, Aurora's instrumentalists and the actor Peter Eyre (for the text's spoken fragments) all delivered 100 per cent. But it was a relief when the A-Train encore arrived.

BACK TO TOP