Aurora Orchestra to Play Mahler From Memory at Proms
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- Aurora Orchestra will perform Mahler's First Symphony entirely from memory at the Royal Albert Hall this Saturday and Sunday, doubling down on a format it pioneered at the 2014 Proms with Mozart's 40th Symphony.
- The first half of the concert is a new play written by the orchestra's principal flautist that frames the symphony through Mahler's documented 1910 meeting with Sigmund Freud, and includes choreography for the full ensemble alongside actors Jack Bardoe and Sarah Twomey and singer Natalie Lewis.
- The orchestra has only a day and a half to rehearse the theatrical first half, which the author describes as requiring memorization of confusing fragments of the symphony and strictly choreographed stage moves — a process they call "flat-packing."
- The approach has become an annual Proms fixture: Aurora followed the 2014 Mozart with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Beethoven's Ninth, and Shostakovich's Fifth, each paired with a 40-minute narrative first half created by the flautist, conductor Nicholas Collon, and co-director James Bonas.
- Mahler's First premiered in Budapest in 1889 to baffled reviews — critics called it "offensively trivial," "a disaster," and "ridiculous" — and the composer's subsequent program notes, which include imagery of hares carrying a small banner and music-making cats, toads, and crows, are folded directly into the script.
Why it matters: Aurora's from-memory Proms performances have become a signature event over the past decade, and staging Mahler's First with a Freudian-narrative first half extends their most ambitious experiment yet — a roughly 90-minute symphony performed without scores by musicians who had only 1.5 days to rehearse the surrounding theatrical staging.
