White-knuckle ride

Playing in an orchestra that disintegrates mid-concert is not an experience you forget. One moment everything’s motoring along nicely. Suddenly a harmony doesn’t quite fit, the soloist enters on the wrong beat: it doesn’t matter, because before you can work out what to do next the confusion spreads, the conductor signals frantically and with a pit-of-the-stomach lurch the floor drops out of the music and you’re all sat there facing the audience amid the one sound that no one present has paid to hear: mortified silence.

The Aurora Orchestra has worked out a way to monetise that sensation. Well, maybe that’s putting it a bit cynically. But if every orchestral performance is a tightrope walk, they’ve very publicly dispensed with their single biggest safety net, and taken to playing full-length symphonies entirely from memory: Mozart’s 40th at the 2014 Proms, Beethoven more recently, and now — upping the ante considerably — Brahms’s First.

So what? Concerto soloists play from memory all the time. But that’s just one player. The Aurora Orchestra’s feat is entirely dependent on every player remembering not just their own part but how it interlocks, over a 45-minute span of music, with up to 23 other musical lines. And although their conductor Nicholas Collon insists that the rationale is purely artistic — about being ‘unshackled from the physical and metaphorical confines of the printed notes’, as he puts it — the potential for disaster is horribly compelling. The crowds that watched Evel Knievel jump Snake River Canyon surely never expected him to reach the other side.

But yes, the Aurora Orchestra made the leap: a red-blooded, extrovert performance that thundered at the opening, blazed at the finish and delivered quite a few cherishable moments in between. I was watching through my fingers in the opening bars — when you’re used to conventional orchestras, the sight of the players standing on stage without music stands is nerve-shredding.