Back when the UK was assumed to be leaving the European Union on 29 March, the Aurora Orchestra was invited to Brussels to participate in Klarafestival: specifically, an evening of words and music ‘celebrating cultural links between Europe and the UK’. And because arts organisations in general (and orchestras in particular) change direction with the agility of a supertanker in pack ice, it went ahead regardless. The cellist Nicolas Altstaedt played John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil with exquisite purity of tone. Ian Bostridge sang Britten’s Les illuminations: brisk, earthy, vividly theatrical. The Aurora Orchestra’s strings, playing standing up, flashed and bristled back at him.
Musicians like to talk about the power of their art to unite and heal. To really sour a mood takes words, though the programme book had promised ‘critical reflection’. A diversity of opinions, then, on a complex subject? If Sulaiman Addonia’s short story ‘A Wild Call’ hinted at grey areas, the other perspectives on offer seemed to have been locked down since June 2016. Jonathan Coe read from Middle England: it was all Thatcher’s fault. Ali Smith read a passage from Autumn — ‘All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti’ — and in the capital of the EU, the crowd laughed and applauded. Like the Bourbons in 1815, they’d learned nothing and forgotten nothing. A steady if sentimental Remainer myself, by the time Smith walked off I was ready to buy Boris Johnson a pint.
In fairness, it’s unlikely that the musicians knew very much in advance about an event that felt like it had been designed by committee — and even if they did, the notion that they were sharing a one-sided political platform probably wouldn’t have arisen. The classical music business is so uniformly pro-Remain (in public, anyway) that it’s effectively perceived as a neutral position.
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