Mozart from Memory BBC Proms

Aurora Orchestra is one of Britain's most innovative ensembles.

They've embraced a risk-taking approach to classical performance

and they've challenged what can be achieved on the concert stage.

They're made of some of the finest of a new generation of players

from Britain and all over the world,

under the leadership of their founder and principle conductor,

Nicholas Collon.

And together, in this Prom, they're going to play

Mozart's last symphony, his 41st in C Major, the Jupiter.

It was written in 1788, and it's probable that Mozart himself

never heard this piece performed before his death in 1791.

We are the lucky ones who can.

However...

We've never heard it performed at the Proms the way

that Aurora Orchestra are about to.

That's because they're going to play the whole of this symphony, all four

of its movements, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of notes,

entirely from memory.

The orchestra have performed pieces from memory at the Proms before.

In 2014, it was Mozart's 40th Symphony,

and last year it was Beethoven's Pastoral.

There won't be a single scrap of written music or even a single

music stand on this stage when Aurora Orchestra play this piece.

That's not new for them as a whole,

but for some of these players this will be a new experience.

There's also something of a first for me too, because I'm going to be

joining Nicholas Collon and Aurora Orchestra on stage.

Now, don't panic, I'm not going to be playing,

but I will be using the chance that the fact that these players

have memorised all of this piece to get inside the world of

the Jupiter Symphony with the Proms audience,

to reveal something of the wonders of Mozart's musical universe.

So, before we hear this performance,

let's meet some of the Aurora players to find out

just how they've prepared to play Mozart from memory.

It's eight o'clock in the morning, and sure enough,

the first thing that I thought of was...

MOZART MUSIC PLAYS

People look at me like I'm a lunatic because I'm just sitting there

with my eyes closed trying to memorise some bowing.

Being familiar with the melodies and the piece as a whole

is a very different ballgame to actually learning it from memory.

My strategy really is to tackle the easiest bits

and the hardest bits first.

You've got to try to feel it without learning it.

It's not something you learn... One, two, three, blah, blah, blah,

three bars to count - you've got to feel it, like a dance.

I like to go for a run each day.

You can use waypoints in your mind of where you are on the run

for where you are in the piece.

I remember, like, a sequence of numbers -

three, five, three, six.

That's literally how I remember it.

Memorising music is a great activity with a small baby because

they quite enjoy you looking silly and humming to them and counting.

So I've kind of been learning it ten minutes here, ten minutes there,

when the baby lets me.

Where do we get this bit?

I've never learnt a symphony from memory before,

so there's a whole other type of pressure.

When I'm walking to work I'll be listening to the Mozart,

it's just taken over my life for the last week -

every single spare minute I have, I'll just say,

"OK, I'll have a listen."

The trickiest part is going from one section to the next

because you might get to the end of one section and go,

"Ah, what comes next? What's the next bit?"

I actually like to leave the bow

completely out of the learning process until the first rehearsal.

The notes themselves are relatively straightforward

for a Mozart symphony, particularly the viola part.

The idea really is to ingest it, inhabit it and then devote

that attention to the imaginative demands of playing.

Individually, the orchestra have had just a few weeks

to learn nearly 1,000 bars of meticulously crafted Mozart.

They come together for the first time just a few days before

their Proms performance to see if all their hard work has paid off.

I do think most of it's in my head already.

There's just always that element of doubt.

The symphony's really getting into everyone's heads,

you don't quite know if you know it -

sometimes you go on automatic and then you question yourself.

It's very hard to stop thinking about it, I have to say.

I've been quite stressed the last couple of days, I haven't had

as much time as I'd have liked.

I feel a bit behind where I'd like to be with it,

but hopefully when we're all in the room together,

it will feel immediately easier.

When you commit a piece to memory like this,

it's more liberated, more detailed,

it's more carefree.

We know that the music's inside us, and we can just let it out.

It's a better performance than we would do with the music.

The act of the music being on the page is something

we're so obsessed about in the way that we interpret a Mozart symphony.

And for him it existed mostly in the space in his head,

and it's quite nice to feel that you're bypassing the page,

having learnt it, and trying to occupy that space somewhere else.

What's amazing about this,

and this is an incredibly early stage of rehearsal, I mean,

there's no sort of falling apart, "What are we doing?"

They're absolutely there already -

it's kind of amazing actually.

It's quite nice, you may agree or disagree, to just get rid of

music stands to the side, put your music on the floor.

There is something different,

when you have the players in front of you, without the music,

it dissipates any hierarchy that sits within the orchestra.

To play from memory, the trust in your colleagues is amazing.

It's like a rugby team before going out for a massive match

in the Six Nations, all working together for rhythm,

for accuracy, for obviously memory,

but that's something we completely forget by the time we walk on stage.

The joy of being in an orchestra is everyone else,

and when I play music, especially these pieces of Mozart,

it's being aware of the conversation - I think is the main thing

sort of going on in my head.

Eyes-up is the thing, concentrate.

Who's next? Who am I with? Who am I answering?

And actually getting rid of the music just heightens all of that.

Second violins and the violas, bar nine...

The first violins carry most of the melody in this symphony, but other

sections of the orchestra have an equally important role to play.

(The people who have the hardest job here are

(the second violins and the violas, the people inside the orchestra.)

Look at stuff like this, these arpeggios - imagine memorising this.

These things have to be so precise,

changes that are happening that aren't the tune -

it's actually much harder to get that in your head or in your fingers

than the tunes on top.

Shall we just stand up, ladies and gents, and we'll play standing?

It's hard to minuet while sitting.

The inner parts are not really designed to be heard,

they're padding, and they're the nuts and bolts

of the music on the whole.

Mozart's just so clever and inventive with the way

he writes for the middle part.

He doesn't just give you the obvious thing,

just subtle variety all the time.

I have the utmost respect for people playing the inner parts,

the viola players, the second violins,

because a lot of their writing is very exciting

and without them, the piece doesn't live.

With rehearsals complete,

the orchestra are ready to put their memorising skills to the test.

Just a day before their Proms performance, there's enough time

for a run-through in front of an unsuspecting East End audience.

I actually need this exercise.

I take it as an exercise for myself and my memory, so if I can do that

I guess tomorrow will be fine, with all the distractions we've got here.

I think this might be even more boomy than the Royal Albert Hall.

It's good that it's coming the day before the concert.

I think it's like the ultimate test.

HE HUMS MOZART

HE HUMS MOZART

HE HUMS MOZART

I'm there, like, 95, 96%.

A nice early night tonight

and saving all that kind of brainpower for, like, tomorrow.

On a scale of one to ten...

Eight.

But by tomorrow, it's going to be nine and a half.

We've seen how much work goes in to preparing a performance like this,

with the whole orchestra playing from memory.

But now we've got the chance to explore Mozart's 41st Symphony

from the inside out.

So together with Nicolas Collon and Aurora Orchestra,

we're going to show just how Mozart makes the musical cosmos

of the Jupiter Symphony.

In this exploration of the Jupiter Symphony,

we're going to focus on the finale, the molto allegro.

And what's wrong with the three previous movements?

Nothing, I promise.

This whole piece is full of the most daring acts

of orchestral imagination.

But this finale is truly something else.

So welcome onstage, here at the Royal Albert Hall, please,

Nicolas Collon and first the violins and violas of Aurora Orchestra.

Now, this finale is the single most ambitious piece

of orchestral music that Mozart ever wrote,

and it's also one of the most thrilling experiences

that we can all have as listeners,

and we're going to find out how Mozart does it.

And we're going to start by all of us here

in the Royal Albert Hall this afternoon

composing the most important four notes of this finale together.

I promise it's not as difficult as it sounds.

We just need a little help from Nicolas Collon and his musicians.

So, Nick, over to you.

Thank you, Tom, very much. Good afternoon, everyone.

Now, here behind me I have the first violin section

handily arranged, as you can see, like a human xylophone.

Now, it turns out if I hit them very softly with the end of my baton...

-LAUGHTER

-..they sound like this.

These are the notes of a C major scale.

Now this is where we get a little bit of...

-APPLAUSE

-Oh, thank you.

If you think that deserves a round of applause...

LAUGHTER

This is where we get a little bit of mild audience participation,

nothing too terrifying, I promise.

Can we sing lustily to "La"?

Nice and big sound.

# La... #

It's easy, isn't it? Try this.

# La... #

If you hadn't realised, you've just very beautifully sung

Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

Deserves a round of applause.

And I have a new-found respect for Peter Snow on

Election Night Special, cos that's hard work, I can tell you,

that's a lot of exercise.

But Mozart didn't have as much fun as that,

he only used the first four notes of our scale -

the C, the D, the E and the F,

and he swaps round the order of the last two.

I'm sure we can do this straight off, here we go.

Got your singing voices?

# La... #

That's the four-note theme,

and he transposes it to the top of the octave as well,

so you also get these four.

This is a little bit harder, this is grade six, here we go.

# La... #

And he uses both halves of the octave in the last movement

simultaneously and at the same time and after each other.

It's an amazing jigsaw puzzle that he puts together.

So you've got your four-note theme.

Bravo, everyone.

Give yourself a round of applause,

you've just written Mozart, for crying out loud.

Thank you, Nick, thank you, all of you.

But not only is that tune as much yours as it is Mozart's,

it had also been hanging around in musical history for centuries

before Mozart wrote this symphony in 1788.

And there is something prayer-like, isn't there, about the way

those four notes move, especially when it's sung so beautifully

as it is by all of you in the Royal Albert Hall.

Now, the first time we hear this musical prayer is right at

the start of the finale, when it's played by the first violins.

The question is though, what Mozart does with it.

Well, first off, he adds harmony,

giving this little musical prayer body, context, meaning.

Beautiful, isn't it?

But it's static - Mozart adds motion.

Look at the second violins up there, just in front of Henry Wood's bust.

And that's not all, because as an answer to the four-note prayer,

Mozart composes a tune which is straight out of comic opera.

That is, however, only the start of this ten-minute finale,

so Mozart needs to extend our four-note prayer

into different musical dimensions,

and he does that at first by writing a tune for the second violins

that sounds as natural, as joyous as if he'd come up with it

whistling in his bath.

Now, the second violins don't have that to themselves -

Mozart gives it to every other part of the string section who come in,

one by one, each with their own version of this melody.

And this is where it starts to get clever -

the first to join the second violins

are the first violins.

And now, the violas.

The cellos.

And last, and most, the double basses.

Now, here's the thing...

What the strings of Aurora Orchestra have just built up there

is a little labyrinth of tunes, each chasing each other,

hanging onto the tail of the one that comes before it.

It's a kind of composition that's called fugue,

from the Latin, "to flee," and it's an absolutely essential

compositional technique that Mozart is going to use

throughout this movement,

an absolutely crucial part of his cosmic compositional arsenal.

It's time now to introduce you to the three other main thematic ideas

that Mozart's going to be playing with throughout this finale.

The first of these is what I call the climbing theme. Why?

Well, it's pretty obvious.

You see, it goes up, with a joyously explosive energy.

And it's not just the upper strings that Mozart gives this tune to,

the lower strings get it as well.

And when you put them together as Mozart does, as you'll hear,

they don't come in at the same time,

they're dissonating with each other, rhythmically speaking.

Basically, they come in at different times.

Well, so far we've only heard the strings.

There are, of course, other instruments

and here they come onstage now.

There are a single flute, two oboes,

two bassoons, there are a pair of horns, a pair of trumpets

and a set of timpani.

The next of our essential musical ideas in this finale is a fanfare.

So let's hear what it sounds like when all of these musicians

play the fanfare together.

Now, the horns can't actually play anything quite that fast,

here's their contribution....

LAUGHTER ..to that musical texture.

I mean, it's not that they can't necessarily, perhaps they choose not to...

Mozart, we know, had a famously difficult relationship with horn players.

At any rate, here's what they're doing in that texture.

CHEERING

Well, you wait...

The trumpets have something even more miraculous.

Let's hear what the trumpets managed to do in this texture.

SINGLE NOTE PLAYS

LAUGHTER

Now, just as he's done with the climbing theme,

Mozart uses the fanfare theme across the whole orchestra and, again,

it's coming in at different times all the time,

if you see what I mean.

What that means is, that for us listening to it,

the effect can be quite chaotic because we don't know

where the first beat of the bar comes.

Whilst it may sound chaotic and busy on the surface,

it's made with all of the care of a Swiss clockmaker.

So we've had the prayer,

we've had the climbing theme and we've had the fanfare.

The last part of our symphonic jigsaw puzzle

is completely different in character,

it's something gentle and lyrical and flowing -

a song.

And...in a moment of inspiration,

Mozart finishes that song off with an idea that we've heard before.

The fanfare, beautifully played by the solo flute there.

That's not all though, because the bassoons are also involved here -

they're playing the climbing theme underneath all of that.

So let's put all of that together.

So now we've heard all of our themes, but what that

last little passage of music tells us is what you can do if you make

a musical texture, not just of one idea,

but from lots of them all working together.

And this is the key and miraculous revelation of this whole finale,

indeed this whole symphony, which is that all four of our themes

your themes, are actually made for each other,

they're all part of a grand musical design that Mozart reveals

only at the very end of the symphony, with all the timing of a conjurer.

So let's hear all of our themes whirling in cosmic harmony.

And that's not even the very end of the symphony, we're going to

save that for the performance that we're just about to hear.

But, ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for Aurora Orchestra

and Nicholas Collon for allowing us inside...

There is, of course, much more than we've had time to go into

in the Jupiter Symphony.

Hang on to any of your themes - the prayer, the climbing theme,

the fanfare or the song,

and you'll get through this miraculous musical labyrinth.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome onstage

here at the Royal Albert Hall, to conduct this performance

with Aurora Orchestra, with heart and by heart

of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, Nicholas Collon.

CHEERING

CHEERING

There's a kind of electricity still coursing around here

at the Royal Albert Hall after that performance,

a performance for me of huge intensity, courage and commitment.

We've seen the journey that all of these players have been on,

individually and collectively, to make that happen,

to perform Mozart's Jupiter Symphony from memory.

Is it worth it to memorise a piece of orchestral music?

The answer, surely, after that performance is a resounding...

yes.

From all of us here backstage at the Royal Albert Hall, goodnight.