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The
Sunday Times / Paul Driver (November 2009)
Aurora Orchestra at Kings Place
These
days, the single concert readily gives place to the concert series - the residency,
the thematic strand, the mini-festival or the maxi version, often involving more
than one institution. At Kings Place, with its two elegant and enterprising halls,
programming is always on the thematic or curatorial principle. You don't get one-off
concerts, but several days of short ones, each lasting about 45 minutes, which
develop a theme and are curated by a particular musician or group. For four days
Hall One was occupied by that estimable institution Aldeburgh Music.
It
offered enjoyable samples of its year-round work and its central attraction, the
Aldeburgh Festival. I caught a sparkling Haydn recital by the Chiaroscuro Quartet,
a period-performance group led by the brilliant Alina Ibragimova, and two Friday-night
concerts by the Aurora Orchestra, a young ensemble with a connection to the Britten-Pears
Orchestra.
In
the past year or two the Aurora, co-founded by its conductor, Nicholas Collon,
has made numerous London appearances, essaying unusual repertory and tending to
take early-20th-century modernism as a reference point. Its first programme included
an arrangement of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune made by Benno Sachs
for Schoenberg's Society for Private Musical Performances; the second offered
Julian Yu's version (2005) of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.
One
could believe Yu set out to subvert Ravel's classic orchestration of this work.
The "Promenade" refrain is removed from the brass and allocated to a ruminative
viola, to suggest a somewhat more impressionable exhibition observer. Vibraphone
washes, echo effects, textural fragmentation and enhanced dissonance indicated
that this was more a fantasy on Mussorgsky than an arrangement, and it did seem
enamoured of its own capacity for colour.
But
it was a bracing novelty, and was complemented in the third concert by a superb
rendering of Ravel's Introduction and Allegro for harp (Sally Pryce) and sextet,
and as pacy and invigorated a reading of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No 1, Op
9, as I've heard. The stylistic distance between this and Schoenberg's expressionist
masterpiece, Erwartung, Op 17, simply collapsed.
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