The Aurora Orchestra welcomes spring in a refreshing and playful classical concert.
For the 2025 season, Kings Place presents Earth Unwrapped, a year-long series that invites exploration and focuses on our planet, nature, and our place within it. With a perfectly suited curation, the ensemble-in-residence Aurora Orchestra took to the stage of Hall One on Saturday, April 5, with Mahler’s headlining song cycle, Song of the Earth.
With a warm and intimate greeting, conductor Nicholas Collon welcomes the audience to a celebration of nature through musical performance. Collon introduces a fitting opening to the concert – Lili Boulanger’s D’un matin de printemps. A lovely motif runs through the piece, reorchestrated for chamber ensemble by Iain Farrington, and truly paints a vivid picture of a spring morning filled with curious embellishments and shifts in tempo and mood.
For the second part of the first act, the stage is rearranged for the baroque orchestration of Jean-Féry Rebel’s Les Élémens. In a playful and varied composition, the music retells the creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. In the beginning, there is chaos with dissonant strings and discords that jump out unpredictably. Still, slowly, the disorder settles and moves into the formation of the elements -earth, water, fire, and air seem to bring structure and calm to the piece, with familiar baroque themes running through these movements. A highlight of the cycle is the Nightingale suite, which receives a cheerful response from the audience as the percussionists use clay bird whistles to mimic the sound of joyous birdsong in the hall, infusing the performance with a light-hearted charm. Percussion makes another prominent appearance in the Tambourine movement, which echoes a medieval estampie.
The second act lends itself fully to the headlining Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler and welcomes mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron and tenor Andrew Staples to the stage. In an emotionally wide-ranging vocal performance that explores themes of nature and mortality, both singers deliver the text with true sensitivity and expression, almost transcending the bounds of the German texts.
I found this portion of the evening’s performance to be profound, lively, and playful. At times, I struggled to connect with the performance as someone unfamiliar with Mahler’s song cycle. Whilst the programme notes were helpful and provided insight into the songs, a written text translation could have further aided an audience member’s understanding. Even as the piece felt somewhat slow and dragging in places, one cannot call into question either the technical proficiency or musicality of the ensemble and singers, with the woodwinds, in particular, shining in this arrangement of the work for chamber ensemble, again rendered by Iain Farrington.
As a first-time visitor to the venue, I found that Kings Place offered a positive experience, with a modern and accessible venue and an excellent opportunity to experience exemplary classical music. The Aurora Orchestra is back at Kings Place on the 4th of October with ‘In the Alps, but there is no need to wait until then, as there is plenty more on offer with the Earth Unwrapped season.