The Lock-In, Kings Place

Aurora is the orchestra with a reputation for doing things differently. It often plays music from memory, which makes the musical journey startling and new, and its members are brilliant all-rounders.

In a series of late-night sessions at Kings Place, a short walk north from King's Cross and St Pancras stations, the orchestral musicians leave behind their classical scores and vamp with each other, and with guest artists. The audience is invited to grab a drink, and just see what unfolds.

Play What You See (5 May) sees traditional musical notation abandoned in favour of graphic scores, in which visual images inspire the musicians' improvisations, a real test of both individuality and teamwork.

Aurora’s principal viola Max Baillie and friends revisit the Viennese venues favoured by Brahms, Schubert, Mahler and Mozart with their modern riff on the sort of traditional music for clarinet, cimbalom (a middle European dulcimer) and accordion that those composers would have heard. Party In Vienna (14 Oct) promises to bubble over with escalating energy.

Schubert himself is to the fore in As Darkness Falls (24 Nov), when Aurora string players perform the deep, dark, intense and moving String Quintet in C Major. The audience gets to the heart of this piece by lying on the floor and floating right in.

Finally, in The Masque of the Red Death (9 Dec), Aurora musicians bring to life Edgar Allan Poe's gothic horror story of that name, through the eerie Conte Fantastique for harp and strings by André Caplet. A glamorous ball is in progress, but a terrible plague rages outside. What will happen at midnight ...?

Whatever the answer, the Lock-Ins promise thrills, spill and chills aplenty.