It is nearly a decade since the Aurora Orchestra and its conductor, Nicholas Collon, started performing works from memory – a calling-card that has led to memorably dynamic performances as well as to some living programme notes that have leaned more towards theatre in their own right. This year’s Proms programme, well run-in after a short European tour, was the wildest project yet: what would happen when they lifted the bonnet on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?
In the first half, two actors – Ghosts’ Charlotte Ritchie and Hamilton’s Karl Queensborough – spoke verbatim from the sometimes contradictory accounts left in diaries or letters by the work’s creators: Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Roerich and, emerging as something of an unsung hero, Marie Rambert, whose job it was to disentangle Stravinsky’s wild rhythms and fix them in the heads of bewildered dancers who were used to executing nice, graceful steps to music by Chopin. Meanwhile, Collon unpicked the score: he had the orchestra sing the folk tune that becomes the first bassoon solo, and he got the audience to clap the simple rhythms that, layered up, make the impossibly complex motors driving the music.
Jane Mitchell’s script was informative, quirky and evocative in the right balance, underpinned with musical excerpts arranged by Iain Farrington. The stage movement, directed by Mitchell and James Bonas, was slick, with Anouar Brissel’s precisely placed projections making animated shapes radiate out from the players on the stage floor.
Bassoonist Amy Harman had already played that impossibly high solo several times by the time she came to launch the full performance. There was no choreographed movement here, just playing of irresistibly high energy, with a slight sense of increased freedom. With no music stands cluttering the view, we could see the ideas pulse from one side of the string section to the other. The audience, armed with new insight, was a hall full of active listeners.
As encores, the players revisited two of Stravinsky’s craziest passages, this time standing spaced throughout the lower hall among the audience, so we could hear individual lines. They were set to repeat the whole thing in the evening, but looked as though they would be happy to play it twice a day for ever. Whatever work Aurora chooses to examine next, the bar is set very high indeed.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 9 October. The Proms continue until 9 September
