——British "Aurora Orchestra" concert Appreciation

 

On 5th evening, "Mini Music Festival" held by Shanghai Concert Hall and UK Southbank Center ended with British band - "Aurora Orchestra" presenting the 20th music century world filled with "collision" and "integration" to Philharmonics.

Opening song "Melody" is created by Austrian composer Ligeti, followed by "first Cello Concerto" written by Soviet composer Shostakovich. The Soviet and European music in the 20th century has developed into two distinct types due to their different ideologies: Western-style liberal innovation and the Soviet-style traditional realism creation, while the arrangement for the two tracks brought the first "Collision” for the audience in the concert. When "Melody" began, piano and woodwind voice constituted a space filled with overlapping ascending chromatic scale, and different rhythm features and independent patterns of different direction of movement were woven into a delicate net in Raleigh McDonald's hands.  Compared with that, “First Cello Concerto" emphasizes more on the large lines in the development of music, and the orchestra particularly stressed the integrity among movements and dramatic contrast. The cellist Oliver Coates played steadily, roughly but full, even with a "fall" feeling and the metallic sound revealed vague sense of vulnerability.

The highlights of the second half are young Chinese American composer Huang Ruo's three transcriptions: "Flower Drums of Fung Yang ", "Love Song in Kangding", "Dabancheng Girl". As a "left home young" international musician, he presented his work mingled with sounds of different forms to us, while the work did not deliberately pursue Chinese melody and tuning, but grasped the spirit of music.  It may be attributed to the differences in cultural background that Raleigh McDonald’s sound seems to be short of Chinese rhythm, with more western aesthetic taste on the contrary.

The audience was still intoxicated with "Chinese style" when "West Side Story Symphony" filled with typical American humor brought the audience to the streets of Manhattan's West Side. Raleigh McDonald's witty satirical tone, full exploration in the expression of dissonant chords and muddy sound formed by the longitudinal acoustic structures ......  jointly performed a brutal and gentle West Side Story, mixed with romantic love and misery death.  (Note: you can enjoy "West Side Story Symphony" performance videos by scanning the two-dimensional code in the front page of today.)

In the 20th-century concerts I have participated, it is not uncommon that audience left early due to poor performance.Although the music was intended to show the "Wonderful Melody"of the 20th century ,there are still some "maladaptive" audience :  taking pictures during performances, snoring discordantly in the back row...... There are more problems worth considering although the performance is remarkable on stage.