Aurora Orchestra are renowned for their adventurous programmes, and this concert is one of three under the rubric of ‘Orchestral Theatre’ that they will present at the Southbank Centre this season. The first half of this “Smoke and Mirrors” programme began with the year 1816, the so-called “year without a summer”. The cataclysmic eruption of the island of Krakatoa created a volcanic winter that saw climate abnormalities across the globe, including blotting out the summer sunlight. It was also the year that Mary Shelley holidayed on Lake Geneva and began composing her Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein, as part of a competition with Lord Byron and John Polidori to write something spine-chillingly ghostly. The literal darkness is a handy figure for the pessimistic vision of human ambition and drive that Shelley and her contemporaries explored, a counter-enlightenment gloom about the scope of reason and knowledge.
The concert opened with Schubert’s Der Wanderer, composed that year, setting a poem of Georg Philipp Schmitt in one of his most distant and estranging songs, opening with treading dissonances in the piano that set the teeth on edge. Marcus Farnsworth is well-known as an exponent of experimental and contemporary vocal music, particularly Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, but here he acquitted himself as a fine recitalist, with a balance of darker hues and lyrical fragility. But this was no ordinary performance: the stage was wreathed in dry ice and lit with a ghostly blue hue as Farnsworth emerged from darkness in 19th-century Byronic garb, delivering his performance from the conductor’s rostrum, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Over the Sea of Fog.
Aurora’s musicians then crept into the gloom, carrying lanterns, and we segued directly to HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!!, a 1979 “pandemonium” for chansonnier and ensemble, which features a wild battery of percussion and box of toy instruments. Gruber’s text is taken from poems by HC Artmann, themselves twisted versions of children’s rhymes, and offer darkly comic, perverse send-ups of superheroes (Superman), figure from pop culture (John Wayne) and gothic monsters (Dracula).
It’s a work characterised by dizzying shifts of stylistic gear and a hall-of-mirrors sense of fun and foreboding, drawing from Eight Songs for a Mad King and Walton’s Façade in equal measure. Farnsworth’s vocal and dramatic agility were tested considerably over the work’s half-hour duration, and well supported by the musicians of Aurora, who were themselves a dynamic part of the action. In each number Farnsworth would return to the dressing-up box at the front of the stage and find something to dress his instrumentalist colleagues in: the whole ensemble became, as the work progressed, a madcap extension of his fractured consciousness. Conductor Nicholas Collon even got his own pair of red pants.