thu 28/03/2024

Seeing is Believing, Aurora Orchestra via Guardian Online Live Stream | reviews, news & interviews

Seeing is Believing, Aurora Orchestra via Guardian Online Live Stream

Seeing is Believing, Aurora Orchestra via Guardian Online Live Stream

Muhly's concerto stargazes vacantly in an otherwise electrifying programme

Its advertised centre of gravity, a concerto specially commissioned from affable whiz-kid Nico Muhly, turned out weightless, and not in a good way. Yet the programming of the Aurora Orchestra's latest adventure showed us why the Arts Council were right to fund this young and dynamic constellation. OK, so I'd have been happiest with a whole evening of Hindemith Kammermusik rather than one movement. But for the new generation of pick-and-mix onliners, the seven eclectic works on the bill couldn't have been more enticing, thanks to the iron fist of velvet-glove live stream presenter-conductor Nicholas Collon.

For future introductions, filmed by the canal basin just outside Kings Place, he'll know to go easy on the "iconic"s, the camera will cut away immediately he's finished so that we don't see the "was that alright?" look, and he has more to say, as well as a more genuinely enthusiastic way of saying it, than the "we've got a really exciting programme for you tonight" opener promised. Like Nico Muhly, whose pre-performance chat with Sara Mohr-Pietsch projected an affable, articulate bright spark but who then in the concert turned into a kinda gurning parody of kooky-charming director Peter Sellars, Collon seemed more relaxed given the right circumstances - in this case, slipping into command mode for the audience just before the concert proper.

Of which he was right to be proud, certainly to start and end with. This was an impressive showcase, the polar opposite to the same team's recent Mozart Unwrapped programmes in the wonderful Kings Place concert hall. The opening gambit was a brilliant yoking-together of the hypnotic stasis in Ives's The Unanswered Question - string quartet with backs to the audience, querulous woodwind aloft, confident trumpeter Simon Cox in the spotlight before dematerialising - and the 1920s pop-music hurly-burly of the finale to Hindemith's Kammermusik No 1, its punctuating tattoos crackling with nervous tension. Muhly's Seeing is Believing seemed to have adopted something of Ives's woodwind twitter and Hindemith's buzz, but unlike his fellow American John Adams, a master composer easily old enough to be his father, he doesn't as yet have the knack of flying through time and space, nor - in this work, at any rate - are there the ideas to carry him.

The elephant in the room, I'm guessing, was Adams's The Dharma at Big Sur, an earlier engagement of the six-string electric violin which Aurora leader Thomas Gould was playing on this occasion. Adams's landscape is big country: I understood this piece much better whizzing along in a car through Cumbria than I had at its first Proms airing. Muhly claims to have been inspired by astronomers and those 1970s space films with portentous voiceovers, but once past the opening, where Gould "loops" his lines and duets, trios even with the recorded result, the electric dimension and the promised sonority of the F string weren't extended, at least in the admittedly not ideal medium of live stream. It came to feel more like stargazy pie: a lot of fisheyes staring vacantly into empty air.

nico_bioSeeing is Believing is mostly consonant in its language, inconsequential in every sense - not least the way in which fast follows slow, and so on, without any feeling of forward movement. I've heard better, shorter pieces by Muhly (pictured right), so I wouldn't rule out the possibility of his new opera, Two Boys, due in June at English National Opera, breaking genuinely new ground.

Even so, Gould had more expressive lines to play in Muhly's modest arrangement of two Byrd choral pieces; along with Adès's version of Couperin's fabulously experimental Les barricades mystérieuses - the major musical Unanswered Question of the 17th century - they didn't banish longing for the originals. And there's more imagination in the way the dizzying violin cadenza yields to bass-line stomp in Adams's Chamber Symphony, the crowning glory of the evening, than in the whole of his younger compatriot's new concerto.

The genesis of one of Adams's thorniest works is well known, and flavoursomely told in his eloquent semi-autobiography Hallelujah Junction: the frenetic lines of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony meet the antics of Ren and Stimpy, the cartoon his son was watching in the next room as he pored over the Expressionist score. Here's a classic example of how a great genius reinvents, Stravinsky-like, rather than plagiarises the models he loves: the lurid clarinet lines early on in "Mongrel Airs", the first movement, could have come straight from Milhaud's seminal jazz-classical ballet La création du monde, but they're transfigured into something striking and personal: the sort of idea a Muhly would kill for.

Yes, it's all so busy, it's all a million angular miles away from the smooth big-band Minimalist elements Adams had incorporated in pre-1990s scores; and it needs playing, and conducting, of surpassing virtuosity. Collon's demeanour said it all: bendy body language combined with a razor-sharp stick technique. From trombone and double bass to piccolo, the players seemed to understand every in-your-face phrase, and the camerawork did them justice (shame about the bubbly sound in my experience of the live stream - laptop with speakers). I only hope Adams, who says he's heard so many bad performances of his labyrinthine masterwork, gets to see and hear it.

STOP PRESS: The Aurora Orchestra has just won the Ensemble category of the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards 2011. The RPS website hasn't yet updated to give the list of winners, but by the time you come to click on the link, it may have got its act together.

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