Britain’s Aurora Orchestra made a name for itself by playing works from memory – no music stands or scores; and, in most performances, no seats except for cellists and keyboard players.
The practice, says Nicholas Collon, Aurora’s conductor, produces higher levels of energy and engagement among musicians, and allows players to move, even to choreograph a piece of music or to segue from one piece to the next, giving a program a sense of musical continuity.
Ordinarily, audiences encounter standing orchestras only when a symphony season opens with the national anthem, or in concerts by early-music ensembles. Even then, they almost always play from scores. Standing up to play Beethoven, Brahms or Tchaikovsky from memory? Not a chance. Certainly not Igor Stravinsky’s fiendishly complex “Le sacre du printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”).
“From the exposed high register of the opening bassoon solo, to the mind-bending rhythmic maze of the closing ‘Sacrificial Dance,’ even the most hardened orchestral player[s] will have their eyes on [scores] throughout, carefully navigating these treacherous paths,” Collon writes in an article for The Guardian.
The difficulty of Stravinsky’s score is compounded when it’s played from memory, the conductor writes. “Take as an example the shockingly terrifying ‘Glorification of the Chosen One,’ which comes midway through the second part. This dance changes metre (i.e., time signature) 49 times within its 58 bars, meaning that nearly every bar has a jaggedly different feel to it. Within each single bar, each musician might be playing as many as 15 notes, often unpredictable and chromatic.
“Add to that the dynamics, articulation, listening to the other parts, and a huge amount of brain space is required. . . . [T]here is no time to think – everything needs to be immediately accessible to the fingers, or else you fall off the moving train. But here’s the thing; the ‘Glorification’ clocks in at 95 seconds, so once this is ticked off, there is still a good 10 minutes more of the piece left.”
Aurora took “The Rite” on a tour that wound up on Sept. 2 with two stagings of the piece in the BBC Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall. (An arena-rock-scale 10,500 tickets to sell – no word yet on how many were bought.) The orchestra opened with “a dramatic and musical exploration” – i.e., listener’s guide – to the work, followed by a complete performance.
You can hear it here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001q14r
Collon asked Aurora’s musicians how hard it was to memorize their parts in “The Rite,” compared with a 19th-century symphony. He got “succinct, and sometimes surprising replies. Amy Harman, principal bassoon (who starts the piece with that iconic solo) told me: ‘Easier. Weirdly.’ Violinists said ‘Harder,’ ‘much harder’ and ‘way way way harder.’ A double-bassist said: ‘Difficult to say. I knew 90 percent of it already and 10 percent was, like, “Holy shit that’s hard!’ ” Violas all stated that Brahms’ First Symphony was the worst.”
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