Aurora Orchestra on a brighter future for classical music: ‘We're planning a concert for June 21’
Before the pandemic struck, the Aurora Orchestra was already famous for breaking the orchestral mould. This adventurous bunch of Cambridge graduates played concerts from memory, collaborated with film-makers and magicians, and turned the act of performing into a choreographed, perambulating spectacle. But then concert life shut down, and suddenly Aurora found it was in the same leaking boat as any other orchestra. It was a case of paddle furiously and reinvent yourself, or go under.
By November, Aurora had lost around £800,000. There was a brief respite during the Autumn when live concerts were allowed, and then the grimness of lockdown and silent concert halls returned. But there were some rays of light. They negotiated a deal with the BBC to release their archive concerts, which could earn some income, and they had got an ambitious new education project was under way.
Now with the government’s roadmap allowing pilot outdoor concerts in April, followed by reduced-capacity indoor events in May, and something akin to normality by June 21, how does the future look? John Harte, the orchestra’s CEO, admits to feeling cautious optimism. “We have done a lot of work over the last few months in terms of stabilising the financial position. Partly that was to do with cutting costs, and also applying for funding from the arts Council and various other sources. We are now waiting for the outcome of an application to the second round of the Cultural Recovery Fund, which we hope to hear about by the end of March. That covers the period April through to June so if successful it should just about see us through to ‘normality’. So in terms of the organisation’s finances, yes, we are confident by the end of this financial year we will have recouped most if not all of the losses we suffered.”
Meanwhile the orchestra’s creative director Jane Mitchell has been busy putting together an online education programme, which is bigger than anything they’ve ever attempted before. “We have built a huge bank of filmed and recorded and written educational resources,” she says, “working with designers and filmmakers and artists in other genres, and getting advice from educational consultants. The idea was to create a resource that gives teachers who are not music specialists the confidence to bring music into schools. It will be piloted in the summer and autumn, and we’re hoping for a national rollout in spring 2022. We’re not viewing this as a pandemic project but one for the long-term.”
How many schools will it reach? “The pilot project we’re launching now will reach the fifteen London based primary schools with which we have a relationship already. It’s hard to put a figure on the number of children, but we hope to reach tens of thousands rather than the thousands that we currently reach, maybe even hundreds of thousands. We don’t think there's anything else quite like this in the educational market at the moment.”
Back in November they were toying with the idea of a fund-raising campaign. Is that still on the cards? “Absolutely,” says Harte. “We will probably launch it after Easter. We are ready for it, because we want to focus the campaign on exciting plans for the future rather than asking people to get us through an existential crisis.” The trouble with laying out exciting plans is that they can so easily be upset by events, as all arts organisations have learned to their cost. Aurora’s response is to try to “future-proof” those plans, as far as possible. “We’ve got used to having to treat dates with a healthy degree of caution,” says Harte, “but we realised as an orchestra and as a sector, it is possible to adapt to changes much more quickly than we imagined. People think of orchestras as these big behemoths cannot change quickly, but that's not the case. For example this concert we did last week at Kings Place was originally planned for a live audience, but we quickly turned it into a streamed concert when that turned out not to be possible.”
“What feels different about the government’s policy now is the clear phased approach. And these “not before” dates are very helpful, because we know we won't have to scrabble around to create something at two weeks notice. There's much there is a much clearer sense of strategy. We are absolutely desperate to get back to larger scale live concert giving. This roadmap does give a sense of optimism and light at the end of the tunnel.” Jane Mitchell admits to being more pessimistic, and more inclined to hedge her bets. “Not being very optimistic has served us quite well I would say. I’ve learned not to trust government announcement, and have built flexibility into what I do. For our big live schools programme I made a roadmap of our own, going right up to 2024, which can be changed or stopped or paused at any moment.”
Might there be more spring and summer dates appearing in the orchestra’s schedule quite soon? “Yes, we are planning now a summer reopening,” says Harte. “We hope we can make things happen at the Southbank Centre, where there’s a sense of real momentum developing, and we’re also planning outdoor events. We actually have an indoor concert at Kings Place planned for the very first day when that is possible, which is June 21. It was originally planned for the 20th, but when the roadmap was announced we pushed it back by 24 hours.”
Lurking behind the overwhelming fact of the pandemic another problem lies in wait for Aurora – Brexit. How big a problem is it? “Broadly speaking, we are heartened by how straightforward it has been to bring our many international players over,” says Harte. “The really serious problem is the mess of post-Brexit touring. The problem is that the government muddled up mobility with migration, and so touring was off the table during the negotiations. Hopefully this can be resolved, and we don't have to deal with ridiculously expensive and time-wasting things like engaging a European haulier to pick up our harps and double basses, because a British truck is only allowed to visit one venue on any given trip. The problem varies from country to country: Spain is a complete disaster, whereas Germany is relatively easy. Unlike Jane I’m an inveterate optimist, and I think that all this stuff will eventually resolve itself.”
For information on Aurora Orchestra’s activities visit their website. Visit the Kings Place website to see their opening concert in the London Unwrapped series given on 26 February
