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.
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