Aurora’s performances at the BBC Proms and Helsinki Festival receive outstanding reviews. Listen back on BBC Sounds (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001q14r). A film of the Helsinki performance will be coming later in the year.
To memorise…. and to inhabit this violent score so thoroughly that the music seemed to flash like electric shocks from the very bones and sinews of the players (standing throughout), was simply one of the boldest and most breathtaking achievements I have witnessed in the Albert Hall – and I’ve seen a few. Collon conducted a performance in which all the musicians seemed bonded together, yet paradoxically liberated. Stravinsky and Diaghilev, the ultimate iconoclasts, would have loved it.
The Times *****
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.
The Guardian *****
The performance itself, in the second part of the programme, was even more revelatory than one had a right to expect. In addition to razor-sharp rhythmic precision and immaculate ensemble, the players highlighted the preternatural beauties of the quieter passages, with their often chamber-like sonorities. The shaping of sinuous phrases and the perfectly calibrated voicing greatly enhanced the experience. Did the playing from memory and the standing to deliver add anything? Yes, there was undoubtedly a frisson in the hall as we were held in the grip of the players’ own intense concentration. And in a curious way, something of the excitement in the air at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées that night in 1913 seemed to be recreated in the Albert Hall on Saturday. The audacity of it all, the adrenalin pumping through players and audience alike, made it a great Proms event.
Evening Standard *****
There are regular concerts, and more memorable concerts, and then there are extraordinary concerts. When Nicholas Collon presented his London-based Aurora Orchestra to his Finnish audience, it was definitely the latter category that applied.
Huftudsbladet *****