Stuart Bruce, Senior Creative Producer, shares more on our approach to co-creation and touring work

Over the years I have heard Orchestras Live occasionally referred to as a touring organisation, presumably because people are aware we have promoter partners across the country and sometimes we work with orchestras in more than one place. But is it right to describe it as 'touring’?

Orchestras Live’s partnerships include music hubs, local authorities, venues, promoters, festivals… and even specific community groups where we are trialing and developing innovative approaches to co-curation and co-creation with orchestras. Some of these partnerships have existed for decades and are based on a long-term sense of shared vision and trust. The role of the OL producers is to work alongside these valued co-investing partners to achieve orchestral work that genuinely contributes to local priorities and aspirations. This is why so much of our work is bespoke.

That doesn’t mean every project or event has to be designed entirely from scratch. Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment major projects such as The Moon Hares, which we’ve held in County Durham, King’s Lynn and Ipswich, have been part of larger tours which have the same artistic backbone and which are adapted to actively involve groups of people in each area so that every performance contains original material that speaks to the local audience.

A few years ago we produced regular series’ of Lullaby Concerts with City of London Sinfonia that toured chamber orchestra family concerts to small venues in the east region, often with a tight geographical focus in order to reach rural communities. In North Yorkshire our partnership with NYMAZ has led to a similar model where orchestral family events with neighbouring OL partnerships are often added to the main NYMAZ rural tour.

More recently, we have co-produced projects featuring Paddington’s First Concert with Sinfonia Viva and presented them in the East Riding of Yorkshire and in Essex, each with different kinds of associated participation activity, such as craft workshops in East Riding libraries and music workshops in Essex primary schools, all enhancing local partners’ priorities whilst helping to attract diverse audiences.

Looking ahead, we are continuing to explore how small-scale live, digital and hybrid events at libraries, museums and other community settings can broaden engagement and encourage people to go on to attend a larger orchestral concert.

So, we do like to replicate certain models where they are appropriate, cost effective, artistically beneficial and environmentally sensible, particularly where they are flexible enough to have input from local people. The key is that we don’t produce rigid, tried and tested events for the sake of simplicity.

The ethos of Orchestras Live is to give our partners, their audiences and communities a real stake in what their orchestral experiences should be. That’s why our notion of ‘touring’ is not a conventional one and can encompass a myriad of ways in which we share the amazing music, artistry and creativity that orchestras have to offer.