Aurora is making its Edinburgh debut this August
This orchestra founded in 2005 by Principal Conductor, Nicholas Collon, memorise whole symphonies – sometimes an hour long and present music with theatrical elements to allow their audiences to get a better understanding of it.
This summer Aurora marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the most influential and performed composers of the 20th century, with a deep-dive into his Fifth Symphony – a work born in the shadow of Stalin's regime that reveals music on the edge of life and death by a composer treading a dangerous line between political obedience and artistic defiance.
Aurora will make their long-awaited debut at the Edinburgh International Festival, with two performances, including one in the Festival's Beanbag Concert Series.
Shostakovich Inside Out (Monday 18 August, 2pm) invites audiences to learn more about the Fifth Symphony in a fresh and immersive way, through a conversational presentation led by Nicholas Collon as the orchestra play the symphony by memory, pausing to share insights and delve into its emotional depth and historical context.
Later the same day, Aurora performs the full symphony by memory, as part of a concert that also includes Abel Selacoe's cello concerto Four Spirits, with the composer himself and percussionist Bernhard Schimpelsberger as soloists (Monday 18 August, 7:30pm).
Made up of a roster of fearless musicians who have developed and grown with the orchestra, Aurora is the pioneer for memorised orchestral performance and has performed entire symphonies from memory at the BBC Proms and beyond for the last 11 years. They will play at BBC Proms on 16 and 17 August ahead of appearing in Edinburgh.
The Artistic Director and Co-Director, Concept and Script for Shostakovich's Fifth by Heart, Jane Mitchell, said: 'Shostakovich's 5th symphony was written under extraordinary circumstances and has been put under a magnifying glass since the moment it was first presented. The stories surrounding the symphony provide a fascinating lens through which to look at the role of artists in a totalitarian state. Our presentation of the 5th symphony will look at these stories alongside an exploration of the score itself, and will take a look at the endless ways in which we can interpret abstract music, throwing light on both the terrifying and farcical nature of a state attempting to control a composer's voice.'
Aurora Orchestra at Kings Place credit Nick Rutter
Like this:
Like
Related
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
42 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Guide #202: Awol headliners to rampaging deer: how festivals survive the worst-case scenarios
We're in the thick of festival season in the UK, where every weekend seems to host a dizzying array of musical mega-events. The likes of Glastonbury, Download, TRNSMT, Wireless and others may already be in the rear-view, but there are still plenty more to come across all manner of genres: Camp Bestival (happening this very weekend), Creamfields, Green Man, All Points East, Reading and Leeds, End of the Road and so many others, across farms, city parks, country estates and the odd mid-Wales mountain range. For the people who run these festivals, months or even a full years-worth of work will have gone into readying for a single, crucial long weekend. The stakes are high: whether things go off without a hitch or not will, in some cases, determine that festival's future. And boy, are there a lot of potential hitches: electricity, sanitation, ticketing, food and drink, security, and the fragile egos of famous musicians, to name but a few. 'The scary thing about festivals is, if you take away one small element, the whole thing collapses,' says promoter James Scarlett. James should know. He books and organises not one but two annual festivals: 2000Trees, a 15,000-capacity alternative, punk and indie festival in Cheltenham, which last month completed its 17th edition with headline appearances from emo veterans Alexisonfire and Taking Back Sunday, along with Keir Starmer faves Kneecap; and ArcTangent, which specialises in metal, math rock, prog, post-rock and general experimental music, and later this month (13-16 Aug) will lure 5,000 punters to a farm near Bristol to hear bands as varied as post-rock titans Godspeed You! Black Emperor, prog-metallers Tesseract, lugubrious indie dance veterans Arab Strap and a duo called Clown Core who play avant garde jazz fusion from a portable loo. In addition, James is also the co-host – along with Gavin McInally, who runs Manchester extreme metal festival Damnation – of 2 Promoters 1 Pod, a weekly, unvarnished, slightly sweary look at how a festival comes together from the booking of bands to the construction of the site. If you have even the most cursory interest in how festivals work, it's a fascinating listen. All of which makes James the person you'd call for in case of something going badly awry on site. So in this week's Guide we've decided to test his firefighting skills, by asking him to solve a series of festival disasters, including some ripped from recent headlines. Read on for his thoughts on awol headliners, heatwaves and herds of marauding deer. Festival disaster #1 | Your headlining band are playing a mind-blowing set but are overrunning. You've already reached the curfew time your festival has agreed with the local council and the band still haven't played their biggest song yet. What do you do? 'I have, occasionally in the past, let bands breach curfew. We got caught once doing it at ArcTangent. A council member was driving home from another event and just thought they'd stop outside the farm. He heard the music stop at 11pm … and then start again at three minutes past! We received a slap on the wrist that time, and have a good relationship with the council as our crowds are never any hassle – but you can lose your licence over breaking curfew, and then the whole festival is gone. So I think normally the answer is the curfew is the curfew. Still, If you've got a headliner who, say, have 45 minutes of technical difficulties, I think there might be an argument to let them break the licence just in order to keep the crowd happy, you don't want an angry 15,000 people who didn't get the headliner that they wanted. There's a health and safety argument for breaking your curfew if that happens.' Festival disaster #2 | A heatwave has descended on the festival site. You've not been told to shut it down, but temperatures are reaching the mid-to-high 30s. What do you do? 'This year we had 53 cases of heatstroke at 2000Trees on the Wednesday of the festival, when people had only just arrived. It's pretty impressive that people have come straight in and gone: bang, heatstroke! You have to have a really good first aid tent. We cleaned the local depot out of saline drips for ours, because so many people were coming in extremely dehydrated. In fact one drummer from a band, Future of the Left, had to go to the tent for severe dehydration and heatstroke. He's a very energetic drummer and in those tents the heat rises, you're higher than the crowd, and you're properly going for it – not really a working environment you want to be in! Still, we've clocked up mid-30s temperatures at 2000Trees at least twice and once at ArcTangent, and you can still run an event in that. It's about communication with your audience: drink water, wear a hat, wear sunscreen, try to find some shade.' Festival disaster #3 | An Icelandic volcanic ash cloud leaves the headliner you've booked stranded in mainland Europe with no way of making it to the festival in time. What do you do? 'If a headliner drops out, you're in trouble. You've just got to be honest with your audience that the band aren't gonna be there. And all you can really do is bump whoever was second from top up a slot, and everyone moves up. We go into each festival with a long backup list of bands that are either local or already on site as punters. So if we get a dropout, we can usually fill the gap at short notice. You can always guarantee that someone will miss a train, miss a flight, get stuck in traffic or just get confused about what day they're playing … which is quite frustrating if you spend all year booking a lineup!' Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday after newsletter promotion Festival disaster #4 | The prime minister has said it is not appropriate for a controversial act to headline your festival. What do you do? 'What the UK prime minister says about Kneecap is of little interest to me to be honest. I'm not being bullied. We were having ex-MPs and current MPs writing to 2000Trees, like they have a say in what we do. We're a business, it's not up to them. I think it was a help that a few other festivals have stuck to their guns on keeping Kneecap on the bill: Glastonbury and Green Man for example. It does give you a little bit of solidarity. If everyone had folded on it and we were the last ones, I guess I would have felt more pressure. I don't think we would have caved until such time as it was a risk to the business over it. And in the end there was no risk. Kneecap were good as gold at 2000Trees – they did a brilliant, amazing headline set, one of the best we've ever had at the festival.' Festival disaster #5 | A fire breaks out on site just days before the festival begins, destroying your main stage, Tomorrowland-style. What do you do? 'If you don't have the main stage for your festival you're probably going to have to cancel because there's not enough space for everyone across the other stages. So you'd be on the phone to every stage and marquee company across the country trying to find a replacement. The problem is, with the massive explosion in the festival industry in recent times, stages and marquees are very hard to come by. It's likely to be squeaky bum time. In the case of Tomorrowland, amazingly, they borrowed Metallica's stage. Bands like ACDC and Metallica tend to tour with two rigs, so they'll be playing one night on a stage with a lighting and sound rig. And ahead of them, in the next city, there'll be another team building their stage for the next show. When that show's finished, they tear that rig down and move on to the next place. Which is crackers really – it's hard to imagine the scale of that.' Festival disaster #6 | A herd of deer has descended on the festival, trampling over tents and chomping on the merch stall. What do you do? 'Well, we had pigs and swans invading our VIP campsite at 2000Trees this year! The pigs had broken out of a nearby farm. There's no gentle way of getting a pig out of a campsite, really, you have to manhandle them. Our production team were chasing them around – it was quite a comic scene. For the swans we rang up the RSPB – 999 for birds – and they advised us to not do anything, and eventually they'd take off, which they did. Deer would be more difficult. You can't go manhandling deer, particularly stags with their antlers. We have 140 pages of risk assessments, covering every risk you could ever imagine … but pigs in the camp was not on that list!' If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
Scotsman
2 hours ago
- Scotsman
The surprising and forgotten roots of the Edinburgh International Festival and its Fringe
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... In 1945, as the clouds of war started to clear from Europe, people of great vision were already planning what became the Edinburgh International Festival. It was not just a cultural decision and certainly not a commercial one. Rather, it was a statement of optimism and hope, to create a better world; to bring people together; to celebrate the permanence of human creativity even as so many of the places through which it had been expressed, in the great cities of Europe, lay in ruins. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad There were many such statements at the time, as people of all nationalities aspired to an international order worthy of those who had sacrificed their lives and their dreams. Conceived of as a cultural manifestation of that mood, the Edinburgh International Festival has survived better than most. The theme of this year's Edinburgh International Festival, directed by Nicola Benedetti, is 'the truth we seek' (Picture: Jane Barlow) | PA Vision of a festival city Hopefully, within the Festival as it exists today, there will be room for reflection upon these noble sentiments as the resolve of 80 years ago, that the same must never happen again, is cast into doubt. War in Europe... the rise of anti-Semitism, these were never supposed to recur. The lead visionary, Rudolf Bing, was an Austrian Jewish impresario who fled to England after the Nazis took power in Germany, to inaugurate the Glyndebourne festival in 1936. As the great opera houses of Europe were reduced to ruins, the concept emerged in his mind of a festival city, where the cream of European talent could reassemble. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad READ MORE: Meet three comedy couples collaborating at the Fringe this year Bruno Walter and Kathleen Ferrier perform at the opening of the Edinburgh International Festival in the Usher Hall in 1947 | Edinburgh International Festival There was no certainty it would be Edinburgh. Bing's first choice was Oxford but he ruled it out because 'town and gown' were too far apart. Bath was considered and so too was Liverpool but, said Bing, 'no money on earth could turn it into a festival city. Edinburgh was a different matter'. Both the newly elected Labour government, eager for such symbols of hope, and Edinburgh's city fathers got behind the idea. In 1945, before the war ended, Bing started working on the 'manifold challenges' which included the fact that 'many of the singers had never heard of Edinburgh'. Thus are the vagaries of history written. As far as can be recalled, the citizens of Edinburgh got behind it too, in principle if not in participation. At the inaugural festival in 1947, coal rationing was still in place and floodlighting the castle was prohibited. The people of Edinburgh donated their coal rations so it could be lit from dusk to midnight. READ MORE: Six myths about the Edinburgh Festivals debunked Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The audience stands for the national anthem in the Usher Hall as the first Edinburgh International Festival gets underway | Edinburgh International Festival Communist Party's cultural committee How much else they had to do with the Festival and the reputation it soon brought to their city, as a centre of cultural renewal, is more doubtful and this produced its own response – the creation of a 'People's Festival' which in time would turn into 'the Fringe'. Two of the leading instigators were also central to what would become the Scottish folk revival, Norman Buchan and Hamish Henderson. It had been 'a fortunate accident', Henderson later wrote, that Bing had decided to site his Festival in Edinburgh, not least because it provoked a reaction which had its own historic consequences. 'When it became clear that the Edinburgh Festival was to be in the main a prestigious showcase for the 'High Art' of the world… it was decided by the cultural committee of the Communist Party in Glasgow (of which Norman was a member) to create an 'alternative' festival' which would feature 'the finest traditional singers and musicians in Scotland and Europe'. It would be fair to say that the Fringe has travelled a very long way from these early objectives. Somewhere within it, there should be at least a nod towards these origins as a people's festival and a celebration of traditional music as a complement to the 'High Arts'. Why indeed should that modest counterpoise not have a place within the International Festival itself? Nicola Benedetti will understand that. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad A slightly jaundiced view There is an endless, annual debate about whether the Fringe is too big, too expensive, too lacking in quality control; probably all true. However, these are best left as arguments for the market to decide though, by same token, it might reasonably be asked why such a hugely competitive market also requires public subsidy. Long ago, I formed a slightly jaundiced view of the Fringe when I was pressed into service as a reviewer of four or five shows a day, each more challenging than the one before to find something nice to say about. But I suppose that's what its many adherents expect of the Fringe – a hopeful search for hidden gems. Back in the day, there was the annual entertainment provided by whatever manifestation of 'filth' a Tory councillor in Edinburgh could be induced by the popular press to be outraged about. The views of the eminently quotable Councillor Kidd were as close as most of Scotland got to the cultural wonderland that was happening in the capital. Fringe nudity A dear friend of mine, Duncan Campbell, later a distinguished journalist at the Guardian who died recently, had a good story. As a student in his native Edinburgh, he appeared in a Fringe production which required him to run naked across the stage. Councillor Kidd was duly informed and readily agreed to be outraged. A tabloid furore ensued. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad To Duncan's horror, his mother decided that as an act of solidarity, she must attend a performance of this theatrical epic. 'If there's one thing you don't want to do,' he said, 'it's appear naked on stage with your mother in the audience.' Let that be a cautionary tale.
Scotsman
14 hours ago
- Scotsman
The best EIF contemporary music shows - Scotsman critic Jim Gilchrist previews the 2025 programme
Scotsman critic Jim Gilchrist picks his contemporary music highlights from this year's EIF programme Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Vołosi Part of the Festival's Focus on Poland concert season, Vołosi are a powerful string quartet steeped who draw on styles as wildly diverse as rock, punk, folk, jazz and film music. Inveterate global troubadours, their performances can range from the lyrical to the wildly improvisational. The Hub, 9 August Triptic Three former members of the much-loved Scottish-based quintet Moishe's Bagel reunite to continue their exploration of global music. Award-winners all, violinist Greg Lawson, pianist-accordionist Phil Alexander and double-bassist Mario Caribé range with zest and passion through klezmer, Balkan and tango styles and beyond, as well as playing their own material. The Hub, 11 August Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ímar Ímar Having emerged from Glasgow's traditional session scene, Ímar, named after an ancient Viking leader, are an award-winning pan-Celtic quintet of Scottish, Irish and Manx musicians. Expect sparkling high energy sets from fiddle and Irish pipes, concertina, bouzouki and bodhran. The Hub, 14 August Østerlide Norwegian nu-folk trio Østerlide bring a fresh and often strikingly beautiful slant to their native folk heritage, with vocalist Liv Ulvik's soaring, ethereal tones cusped by guitarist Andreas Haddeland and percussionist Ulrik Ibsen Thorsrud. The Hub, 16 August Østerlide Up Late with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith The synth-driven soundscapes of American composer, performer and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith have variously described by critics as 'sublime' and 'dreamy'. Key to her work – in addition to her own ethereal vocals – is the Buchla modular synthesiser, which she credits with creating 'happy accidents'. The Hub, 16 August Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Catrin Finch & Aoife Ní Bhriain The duo of Welsh harpist Katrin Finch and Irish violinist-fiddler Aoife Ní Bhriain is both a marvel of contrasting yet empathetic timbres and a fine colloquy between cultures. Both musicians transcend genres, Finch adventuring well beyond classical while Ní Bhriain, lauded as a classical soloist, grew up in Dublin surrounded by traditional music. The Hub, 18 August Canvas of Sound with Tazeen Qayyum Pakistani-born Canadian artist Tazeen Qayyum initially trained in miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, but her practice now spans a wide range of media and often incorporates live performance. In Canvas of Sound, she will create a calligraphic drawing in real time to music blending Middle Eastern rhythms and jazz from Basel Rajoub (saxophone, dulcimer and percussion) and qanun player Feras Charestan. The Hub, 21 August William Barton The indigenous Australian composer, multi-instrumentalist and didgeridoo virtuoso William Barton is also appearing as a soloist with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Here he performs solo, featuring intriguing sounding compositions informed by elements as diverse as his Kalkadunga heritage and a youthful love of Elvis Presley, AC/DC and Vivaldi. The Hub, 23 August Endea Owens
