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.
