Aurora Orchestra Unveils 2024 Season
Aurora Orchestra today reveals its 2024 season, with a host of programming designed to inspire audiences of all ages. With immersive performances, creative partnerships and family offerings, the season builds on Aurora’s ambition to reach new audiences through presenting classical music in unusual formats and venues, and continued London residencies at Southbank Centre and Kings Place.
Allan Clayton joins Aurora for Hans Zender’s extraordinary reimagining of Schubert’s song-cycle Winterreise, presented in a new ‘Orchestral Theatre’ staging (14 and 16 March, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre). Schubert’s wanderer, sung by Clayton, embarks on a winter’s journey in a vivid depiction of a human heart broken from unrequited love, set to Wilhelm Müller’s text.
Jane Mitchell, Creative Director, Aurora Orchestra, says: ‘We are so excited to be working with Allan Clayton for this production of Winterreise. Allan and I have been exploring the piece together and looking at the potential Hans Zender’s arrangement offers to bring the orchestra into the storytelling. Featuring wind machines, harmonicas and an extraordinary array of percussion, Zender’s arrangement invites us to experience Schubert’s devastating work in a new light and to examine the relationship between the lonely, ever-wandering soloist and his accompanying orchestra.’
Following Aurora’s critically acclaimed performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and its sell-out performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in superclub Printworks London earlier this year, the orchestra continue their series of memorised performances which strive to get under the skin of classical works and present them in an entirely new way. The orchestra gives Beethoven’s revolutionary Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica’ the Aurora treatment with an introduction to the work presented by BBC Radio 3’s Tom Service and Principal Conductor Nicholas Collon, who will dismantle and reassemble the ground-breaking work with the help of live excerpts, before the orchestra perform the complete symphony by memory (8 May, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre). Also on the programme is Strauss’s 1945 Metamorphosen, scored for 23 solo strings; an ecstatic, elegiac work that closes with an Eroica quotation that mourns the devastation brought about by another, even darker, political regime.
The orchestra will tour the same programme to The Apex, Bury St Edmunds (7 May). Aurora also returns to Snape Maltings following a sold-out performance in August, pairing its memorised ‘Eroica’ with Strauss’ first horn concerto, recently-appointed Principal Horn player Annemarie Federle taking centre-stage as soloist. The orchestra’s final ‘Eroica’ date in East Anglia is a return to the Norfolk and Norwich Festival for the first time since 2016, with two performances in Norwich Cathedral (11 May).
Aurora’s residency at the Southbank Centre also includes a one-of-a-kind show curated by the venue’s Resident Artist, violinist and director, Patricia Kopatchinskaja (24 April). Known for bringing theatrical traditions to the classical stage, Kopatchinskaja transforms Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room into a living room for two performances presenting works by Schnittke, Ligeti and Cage.
Aurora continues to open up the world of classical music to new audiences, young and old, challenging expectations through creative and engaging concert presentation. The season features a series of family offerings, designed to bring music alive and inspire the next generation of musicians and music-lovers.
Following a sold-out world premiere at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in March 2023, Aurora revives Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen’s much-loved children’s story, The Wolf, the Duck and the Mouse for its new season at Kings Place (23 November 2024). With a musical reimagining by composer Martin Suckling, the work introduces young children to orchestral music and instruments through the unusual adventures of a duck, a mouse and a wolf!
Aurora’s Far, Far, Away series invites children aged 0-5 and their families to enter a magical world of music, discovery and play, through chamber arrangements of well-known classical works and original stories from Aurora Writer-in-Residence, Kate Wakeling. Children can travel back in time 200 million years in Beethoven and the Dinosaurs (2 December – 10 December, Kings Place), and take a climb aboard different engines of history in brand-new show Mendelssohn and the Moving Machines (13 – 14 February, Southbank Centre), which features new arrangements of Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s music by Iain Farrington.
Aurora continues to appear in London as Resident Ensemble at Kings Place, embracing the venue’s year-long Scotland Unwrapped series with four concerts celebrating Scottish music:
The orchestra takes audiences on a trip to Scotland in a concert centred around Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 (3 February). Inspired by the landscapes and mythology of Scotland, Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony showcases folk-inspired melodies paying homage to the history, nature and dwellers of the Celtic lands. The concert also includes Sally Beamish’s Scottish-inspired Fanfare, featuring trumpeter Aaron Azunda Akugbo, and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s evocation of his home island of Orkney; before Aurora’s Principal Horn Annemarie Federle – a 2020 BBC Young Musician of the Year finalist and one of the UK’s most in-demand young instrumentalists – makes her Kings Place solo debut in Strauss’s Horn Concerto No.1.
Folk ballad arrangements from Scotland and North America are the starting point of Outlanders (27 April), a performance with singer, song-writer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Amidon and other guests to be announced. Inspired by the journey of a folk song from its Scottish roots via Scandinavia to 21st-century America, the programme features contrasting arrangements of the macabre Two Sisters murder ballad, including Nico Muhly’s contemporary setting, The Only Tune. Interwoven through the journey is a sparkling selection of chamber music by Scottish and American composers spanning three centuries, including works by Anna Meredith, James MacMillan, Caroline Shaw and Steve Reich.
Aurora collaborates with violinist Donald Grant in a programme inspired by the hardship, wild beauty and community spirit of an island winter, with traditional Gaelic and contemporary string music (28 September). The shadows of a winter evening settle in the world premiere of Grant’s Thuit an Oidhche Oirnm (The Night Overtook Us), before diving into Scottish folklore in Ailie Robertson’s The Black Pearl, and exploring glimmers of hope for the returning sun in Helen Grime’s To See the Summer Sky, a reminder that brighter days always lie ahead.
Scottish pianist Steven Osborne joins two of Aurora’s principal players for an evening of Debussy and Ravel, two composers central to his musical life (22 November 2024). From the freshly radical Arabesques of Debussy’s youth, to Ravel’s high-octane Piano Trio, the evening showcases the immense depth of Osborne’s musicality and refinement of expression.
Starting today, from 28 November to 5 December 2023, Aurora will take part in the Big Give Christmas Challenge, an annual match fundraising programme, this year raising money for Mendelssohn and the Moving Machines as part of the orchestra’s Far, Far, Away series. A Big Give video can be viewed here and supporters can make a donation via this link.
From today, Aurora Orchestra launches an Under-30s scheme, offering discounted concert tickets and exclusive content via a monthly email. Find out more here.
John Harte, Chief Executive, Aurora Orchestra, says: ‘Aurora’s 2024 season combines a strikingly diverse series of musical journeys, ranging from cherished masterpieces by Beethoven and Schubert to newly-commissioned music via Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Ligeti and Maxwell Davies. Along the way we’re thrilled to welcome an equally varied roster of soloists working across a wide range of musical styles, including Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Allan Clayton, Steven Osborne, Donald Grant, Sam Amidon, and our own Annemarie Federle. As ever the common thread linking all of our work over the coming year will be a commitment to giving the richest and most vivid experience of orchestral music to audiences of all ages.’