Best interlace for aurora player3/16/2023 ![]() It was strong footage, sometimes well-placed, but sometimes at odds, with Du Yun’s score, whose orchestral and tonal world was decidedly abrasive and serially-minded, but mostly undistinguished. Jarrar’s film featured only young people: visibly hopeful, living on the street, at a railway station, on the move, in the dark. ![]() Intercuts of Jarrar’s filmed record of his journey to Western Europe alongside Syrian refugees moved into – and at moments took the place of – Du Yun’s swashing palette of sounds. The second half consisted of another epically-minded piece: Where We Lost Our Shadows, a collaboration between composer Du Yun and filmmaker Khaled Jarrar. The music shimmered, broke, bent and realigned itself throughout 20 minutes of a hugely impressive work that communicated both the inevitable and timeless core of a folk tradition and its beautiful but dark transformations. Amidon’s renditions of the words, scored in repeating, fragmentary bursts, echoed the world of Samuel Beckett, giving the audience an experience of gradual descent into a strange world with occasional moments of dazzling illumination. Muhly’s The Only Tune, composed in 2007 for Amidon, was the fourth and final transformation of The Two Sisters an ambitiously compressed, varied treatment. It was a mesmerising melding of orchestral and folk textures that was carried further in Amidon’s performance of Saro, a similarly well-disseminated standard of what we now largely label as American folk music, though, as this first half impressively showed, the European origins of this music has featured pathological alteration and transformation, though maintaining an unalterable core which eventually crossed the Atlantic to be turned and tossed again. Under a gently fingerpicked tune initially trotted out on Amidon’s banjo, the Aurora Orchestra swelled and rolled (as the changed title suggests) a far more tranquil version of the story, at least on the outside. Amidon, a curly-haired and unassuming performer with an infectiously attractive voice and suitably unpretentious delivery, then introduced another transformation of the ballad, Scottish this time, where it became The Swan Swims and is apparently counted as one of the “muckle sangs”, long narrative songs. The orchestral section of the evening then came to an end as Amidon and Muhly took to the microphone/guitar/banjo and the piano respectively. Johnston and the orchestra then moved seamlessly into a rendition of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, full of tension and grace, an interlude of surety and warmth. Folk music’s ancient and unfathomably wise-sounding beauty was again given a full orchestral, harp and soprano-laden treatment, by no means overlaying or crowding but carving out a beautiful, richly-textured territory for the song to sound in. This line was picked up again in another arrangement by Farrington, this time picking the metamorphosis up in a Northumbrian version renamed The Miller and the King’s Daughter. It is typically eerie and disturbing fare for an ancient folk song, and its transformative journey began with a lyrical arrangement by Iain Farrington, full of blissful harp and Jennifer Johnston’s sensitive, delicate mezzo-soprano. It was accompanied by captivating projected animation work behind the orchestra, the work of animator Ola Szmida, which laid out the main episodes in the story, side-by-side. The first half, long, languorous and enveloping in the best senses, gave us the transformation story of one strange and disturbing song – a ‘murder ballad’ – in which one sister pushes the other into the river so that she may marry her intended the miller makes a self-playing harp out of the drowned girl’s bones and golden hair the killer sister and the miller are eventually killed. “Songs from the Road” offered a look at many forms of transformation and migration.Ī Norwegian folk song, known in Appalachia and the larger English-speaking world as The Two Sisters, migrated through the centuries until it lay in the hands of Nico Muhly alongside his collaborator, American folk musician Sam Amidon. On the closing day of the SoundState Festival at Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Aurora Orchestra was the machinery supporting an eclectic group of instruments, soloists and textures.
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