Aurora Orchestra at Reverb Festival, Roundhouse, review No doubt about it: when it comes to eye-catching presentation, the Aurora Orchestra leaves everyone else standing. This concert, part of the Roundhouse's Reverb Festival, took place under a constantly shifting light show of blues and reds. The players stood to perform, and conductor Nicholas Collon was an engaging host as well as a flamboyantly energised director. Even the printed programme was eye-catching. The concert's theme of "the city" was mimicked by jumbled typography for Strauss's Metamorphosen (representing the rubble of Dresden), skyscraper-shaped paragraphs for Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison's Gotham (representing New York) and a mock train timetable showing the comings and goings of the themes in Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. All this, and a packed young audience, produced a tingling excitement. But the music's the thing, and here the results were more mixed. It was difficult to prepare oneself for the infinitely sad utterance of the cellos at the beginning of Strauss's piece with the loud hum of the lighting rig in one's ears. Once under way, this musical obsequy for a musical culture reduced literally to rubble was certainly impassioned. Amid the welter of grief-stricken counterpoint - somewhat smudged by the sound "enhancement" - one could hear some truly delicate playing, from the leader Ania Safanova, violist Max Baillie and cellist Oliver Coates, among others. If the piece lacked a sense of tragic dignity, that may not have been the players" fault. It's hard to be tragically dignified in a sea of blue and red light. Having seen the talent and passion of these young players, it was distressing to then see them reduced to automata in Michael Gordon's Gotham. Here the orchestra (with the strings now augmented by winds and percussion) played against a backdrop of filmed images from Bill Morrison. The piece was arranged in three movements, the first of which explored the notion of rural retreat from New York. The slow accretion of melodic lines in the music and the grainy black-and-white imagery of the film had a certain meditative charm. But even this modest appeal was absent from the following two movements, which crushed the complex human reality of urban New York under a juggernaut of mechanised aural patterns and images. That human reality came flooding back in Bernstein's Symphonic Suite, along with real, exuberant musical invention. It was a joyous way to end an evening of mixed delight and frustration. Reverb Festival until Sun (www.roundhouse.org.uk)