Every seat became the best seat through Aurora Orchestra’s imaginative staging.
The Aurora Orchestra’s performance of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall made a distinction between performers and audience, bringing the two together in a unique and engaging way. As the audience sat on the stage and the orchestra moved around them throughout the performance, listening became an active experience rather than a passive one.
With around thirty musicians for a symphony this celebrated, the music Mozart wrote became legible in a way they rarely are in larger halls with larger forces. You could hear the violas arguing quietly with the violins, the bassoon’s dry commentary underneath it all, instead of one composite orchestral sound there were smaller forces and sharper outlines.
The real discovery, though, was in the movement itself. As the musicians moved around the stage between movements, the same musical material kept reappearing from new physical angles, and with it came new colour: a viola line that had previously been background suddenly had weight and presence, the trumpets’ final triumphant calls arrived from an unexpected corner of the room and landed with real force. Mozart didn’t write spatial movement into this piece, but Aurora’s staging behaved as though he had as though there was a version of the Jupiter Symphony that had always wanted to be heard from inside the orchestra rather than in front of it.
That proximity did something else too, it exposed the mechanics of ensemble playing that are usually invisible from a concert seat. A glance traded before a difficult entrance, a shared breath and subtle gestures evidence of musicians listening to each other in real time, rather than simply executing a score in unison. And to top this all off, the entire orchestra learned all four movements and executed these flawlessly all from memory.
Much of the warmth we felt throughout this evening came from the conductor, who spoke to the audience very charismatically and encouraged participation and curiosity. It freed the evening from the formality that you would normally associate with a classical music concert.
Perhaps the performance’s real achievement was a packed, generationally mixed hall. Children, parents, people who plainly knew the symphony by heart, people who may never have heard live orchestral music before, held in equal attention for the same reason. Nobody needed expertise. The staging itself did the work of attention where they simply changed where everyone in the room was standing. And in doing so found a 230 year old work hiding a performance it had never quite had before.