Aurora Orchestra: Cambridge Summer Music Festival

“Aurora is the most bracing breath of fresh air to invigorate the British classical music scene in the past ten years.” Richard Morrison, The Times

 

Bold, fresh and fearlessly virtuosic, everything Aurora Orchestra touches sounds new.  In recent seasons the orchestra has attracted particular acclaim for performances of whole symphonies entirely from memory: unique amongst orchestras worldwide, this remarkable approach allows players to connect with the music and audiences on a new and intensely personal level.  For this special CSMF performance, Aurora delivers what is thought to be the first memorised performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony in the modern era.  With presentation from Tom Service and conductor Nicholas Collon, the orchestra will harness the potential of memorised performance to get under the skin of this groundbreaking work. 

 

The programme opens with Richard Strauss’s  Metamorphosen (1945). Toward the end of his life Richard Strauss underwent a profound aesthetic change that resulted in some of the composer’s most intensely personal and philosophical music.  Scored for 23 solo string players, this ecstatic, elegiac work closes with an ‘Eroica’ quotation that mourns the devastation brought about by World War II. 

 

"Marvellous… Playing from memory, Aurora created an organic sense of community, dynamism and inspiration.” David Allen, The New York Times