Aurora Orchestra: Eroica By Heart

The defiant opening chords of Eroica, as Beethoven’s Symphony No.3 is known, marked the arrival of the Romantic symphony. In Aurora Orchestra’s novel introduction, BBC Radio 3’s Tom Service and Principal Conductor Nicholas Collon dismantle and reassemble this groundbreaking work, with the help of live excerpts, before Aurora gets under the skin of the work by performing the complete symphony from memory. But no music exists in a vacuum. Richard Strauss’ 1945 Metamorphosen is scored for 23 solo strings; an ecstatic, elegiac work closes with an Eroica quotation that mourns the devastation brought about by another, even darker, political regime.