Back in 2013, the then BBC Proms director Roger Wright approached me with an idea to perform a site-specific piece by the composer Benedict Mason at the following year’s festival. Entitled Meld, the piece was unlike anything we’d ever done – a fabulously intricate journey involving over 100 players and singers performing from all over the Royal Albert Hall in dozens of different configurations. You can still see the recording here.

Initially we found it really difficult to come up with a repertoire pairing for Benedict’s extraordinary piece. The Proms team were keen to have some recognisable ‘core' music in the programme, but it seemed to us a shame to do something conventional alongside something so unusual.  In the end we hit on the idea of presenting a well-known work in a completely different way – adopting the same memorised approach which Meld demanded for a performance of Mozart’s 40th symphony.

London's Printworks - setting for Aurora's experiment with technology, and Beethoven (photo: Carolina Faruolo)

Since that first ‘by heart’ project, Aurora has performed over 10 symphonies in this way, spanning well over 100 concerts all over the world. At the outset we didn’t expect that the approach would become a hallmark of our work, but it soon became clear that for special projects there were a host of artistic benefits to working in this way.  Freed from stands and scores we were free to experiment in new ways with theatrical ideas in performance, as well being able to develop a completely new kind of introduction to the music being performed. Most importantly we found – for our particular group at least – that it led to a higher quality of performance. Memorising a whole symphony allowed the orchestra to achieve a far deeper shared musical understanding than would ordinarily be possible, heightened the sense of communication between and within sections, and injected a wonderful sense of spontaneity and drama into each performance. The orchestra has become so enthused about performing in this way that these days we have even started applying the same approach to studio recordings.    

One of the things we’ve most loved doing with memorised performances is an 'immersive encore’: at the end of a memorised symphony, we send the players out into the concert hall to play amongst the audience members in the auditorium. People often tell us that this is a highlight of the experience for them – they love the sense of being enveloped within the orchestra and getting up close to the musicians. As musicians it’s wonderful to be able to convey the thrill of what it’s like to be physically inside the living organism of an orchestra as it performs – this isn’t something that you can usually share with an audience. 

We’ve often wondered if it might be possible to take this ‘immersive’ idea further – wouldn’t it be amazing to be able perform a whole symphony with the audience inside the orchestra in this way? We’ve experimented with the concept over the years, and have found it can work really well in small-scale settings such as schools workshops or pop-up performances for audiences in unconventional spaces. But when trying to develop the idea into a larger-format event with a bigger audience, we’ve always run into technical challenges. If you radically expand the orchestra’s footprint to accommodate an audience of even a couple of hundred, it becomes increasingly difficult not just to find a venue of sufficient size to host the performance, but also to preserve the perfect ensemble and communication between players which make these performances special in the first place. It also gets much harder to ensure that every audience member experiences sound that is both thrilling and well-balanced.  

Recent developments in sound technology have for the first time allowed us to tackle these challenges. This week sees Aurora perform Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 at Printworks London, the cavernous 16-acre building in Canada Water which formerly housed Europe’s largest printing presses, and now operates as one of the UK’s leading electronic music venues. For a pair of special performances we’re going to be inviting an audience of 1,000 to experience the symphony from inside the orchestra as it performs in an ‘exploded’ configuration, spread out across more than 500 square metres in the awe-inspiring industrial surrounds of the Printworks ‘press halls’. Audience members will be free to choose their own journey through the symphony and to get up close to players in ways that would be impossible in a concert hall.  

Getting down to detail: how the orchestra's players will be spread throughout the venue

To make this possible we’re using Soundscape, the flagship sound reinforcement system created by German audio specialists d&b audiotechnik. Soundscape is a revolutionary system which allows for the creation of a virtual acoustic in just about any space. A ring of high-quality d&b speakers is combined with cutting-edge computer processing power and sophisticated acoustic emulation to give sound that is transparent, enveloping and perfectly balanced irrespective of the host space. Essentially it should allow us to replicate the sound of one of the world’s great concert halls in the vast industrial setting of Printworks, reinforcing the sound of the orchestra in way that is natural, harmonious and enveloping for both players and musicians. Whilst Soundscape technology has been used all over the world in recent years – from the Ravenna Festival to Björk’s live shows – it has never been deployed in this way to reinforce sound from an orchestra intermingled with the listeners. 

To create the system we’ve worked closely with global Soundscape specialists Southby Productions, who are will be constructing one of the largest Soundscape installations ever built, with more than 80 speakers and a pair of powerful computer processors used to create the acoustic shell. The system will be operated by sound engineer Tim Hand, and as well as reinforcing the orchestral sound will be used to play electronic music by the composer Sam Swallow which has been created especially for the event to frame the movements of the symphony. None of us quite know how the experiment will work, but we can’t wait to hear the results on Thursday!

John Harte is the Chief Executive of Aurora

Aurora will perform Beethoven's Symphony No 7 at the Printworks, London, on Thursday November 11: more details