Less a journey into night than a fall from grace to oblivion, Aurora Orchestra’s latest concert followed a simple if unexpected trajectory. The only clue to its character was an overarching title, De profundis, borrowed for the concert from the Lorca poem that opens Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, although Ad profundis would have been more appropriate for a programme that began with the shimmering beauty of Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, rendered by chamber forces (20 strings plus harp) as though awakened by the summer sun – and careered into darkness thereafter.
Nicholas Collon added percussion to the string phalanx for a startling performance of what Shostakovich deemed his greatest work. Together they glowered and growled through the eleven settings of poems on love and death by Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker and Rilke. Two exceptional soloists sang with blazing commitment: soprano Elizabeth Atherton unafraid to snarl when death prowled the night in Lorca’s Malagueña; bass Peter Rose sounding throughout like a prophet of doom steeped in rough vodka. Neither artist was intimidated by the troubled heart of the music, nor its dark soul, and more than anything it was their shared lack of reticence that made the performance so searingly powerful.
Shostakovich’s friend (and the symphony’s dedicatee) Benjamin Britten conducted the UK premiere of this symphony, several of whose songs allude to his own works – the gloomier ones, naturally – starting with plaintive string figures redolent of Peter Grimes and moving on from there. More striking still are the seedings of Britten’s own Death in Venice, whose strawberry vendor sings a motif straight from Apollinaire’s The Suicide (“Three lilies” – a desolate, extended number by Shostakovich that Atherton and principal cellist Sébastien van Kuijk delivered with aching conviction) and whose youthful gymnasts dance to the same xylophone that his Russian counterpart used to depict a young soldier, doomed to die: “my little soldier, my lover and my brother”.
If Collon rowed the audience to Hades after the interval, beforehand he had already acknowledged the two composers’ kinship with an affirmative account of Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. During the faster variations the brilliant Aurora string players shot streaks of aural flame through Kings Place Hall One, their home auditorium... but was it mere fancy that let me hear an edge to his reading, as though the conductor were deliberately paving the way for the darker music to follow? The steamroller he drove through the closing Fugue and Finale certainly took no prisoners.
