THE lights dim, the auditorium hushes and the curtain rises. With audiences forking out up to £225 a ticket to visit the Royal Opera House, hearing the world’s leading classical musicians and singers, watching high-end musical performances is a serious business.

But what if, as the orchestra strikes up the opening bars of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, instead of punters sitting quietly on velvet seats in their evening finery, the show is outdoors, free for all and in the midst of a massive street party?

For the players of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Britain’s leading proponents of the music that reflected a world of revolutionary, humanist thought, both settings are just as valid.

The orchestra, which has its home at Acland Burghley school, Tufnell Park, play at all the renowned classical venues – Glyndebourne, Kings Place, The South Bank…

But its professionals are just as excited taking their work into primary school assemblies and Camden Town pubs – they are set to play the Fiddler’s Elbow at the end of September – and lively street parties.

It is what they do, explains the OAE’s educational director Cherry Forbes. The oboist is responsible for taking the OAE’s extraordinary work to as many people as possible – and inspiring new fans of composers who reflected the values of an age where reason and logic were taking on religion and superstition.

Cherry understands first-hand how classical music can impact on young people’s lives.

“I started out, like many do, on the recorder,” she recalls. “When I was a child I had the most amazing teacher, Mr Flanagan, and his influence has coloured my whole life.”

It was Mr Flanagan who steered the instrumentalist towards the oboe.

“He told me my teeth were not quite right for the flute,” she remembers.

“I started playing the oboe when I was aged about seven. I was quite young but I was in a fantastic school.”

Cherry has carried this experience into a career as a musician. The orchestra’s home at Acland Burghley makes it the only educational institute in the UK that boasts a resident professional concert orchestra. Being in such close proximity to leading musicians has a knock-on effect for the school’s own arts offering.

“The idea of a mentor is so important when it comes to musicians,” adds Cherry. “It means we are superbly placed for what we do.”

Cherry studied at York and it was there she enjoyed a grounding in baroque and the oboe.

“I got interested in baroque and the classical music of the period,” she says. “My ambition was to play with a baroque orchestra.”

York was a hotbed of baroque music, a place where like-minded musicians met to study. It also gave Cherry an insight into the evolution of her instrument.

“The baroque oboe is completely different to the modern oboe,” she says.

The orchestra uses the instruments baroque composers would recog­nise, and an orchestra member is a craftsman who makes instruments to original designs.

“The violins and violas we use can be original as they last longer,” she says.

The first oboe used box wood and had two keys for the musician to operate. As technology advanced, oboes developed to have seven keys. By the 1900s, African hardwood was used and the oboe as we know it today was produced.

As well as using instruments based on the designs of the 1700s, studying the music of 300 years ago requires academic rigour. It is not a case of picking up a score and launching into it on the count of four.

“I love the research angle – how we find out all about the music and how it was written,” she says. “I love Bach. I love Mozart. Playing the music by these brilliant composers on the instruments they played on is just magic. I love the sound.”

After graduating, Cherry studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall. She found another inspirational mentor, oboist Anthony Robson, and Cherry paid for lessons by cleaning his house.

“It is always all about the mentor,” she says. “You find amazing musicians are humble. They want to share what they have and that is no more important than when working in an orchestra. You need all these different parts, and within it you have all these different roles.”

Working as a professional musician saw her tour the world, and Cherry started at the OAE as the educational director in 1999.

Now the orchestra plays residencies nationwide and runs programmes that broaden access to orchestral music.

“My commitment is to make music available to everybody, from the very youngest to the very oldest,” she says.

“We do not dumb it down. This is the real deal. We share our passion. It is about participation.”

On Saturday, the orchestra presents a show for the under-fives at Acland Burghley called The King Of The Sea, telling the story of Poseidon set to the compositions of the baroque greats.

And then on Sunday, they are taking their version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute to the York Rise Street Party.

The entire orchestra will be performing in the middle of a street in Kentish Town for free.

“The Magic Flute show takes the brilliant music and adds a narrator and two singers,” explains Cherry. “We have an imaginative approach. These are participatory pieces. For me, the joy very much comes form the audience being involved and having a voice in what we do. We use imaginative approaches. The music stands up for itself but how we share it is what we are passionate about.”

Taking such a renowned piece and putting it in a setting where opera would not normally be found might sound a new approach for today’s audiences – but when Mozart wrote the music, such an idea would not be altogether alien.

“Baroque is very participatory,” she adds. “The idea that an audience should sit quietly and soak it up would be strange to the crowds who first enjoyed the work. Audiences centuries ago were very different.

“They would have been very vocal about their response to what was being performed. If they liked it, they showed it – and if they didn’t, they let the orchestra and composer know. They were a boisterous audience. Sitting still and listening is a completely different concept and we hope to challenge that. When you watch the OAE, the connection is fascinating and fabulous.”

Such events are eye-openers and are a central plank to increasing access to arts.

In an educational climate where students are told university humanities courses are not worth studying because of the perception that all that counts is the salary you may earn is damaging and blinkered, she says.

“There are so many things music should be valued for,” she adds. “We just have to keep making the case and the OAE does this every single day. We need to be constantly challenging the view of what is important in the curriculum and make sure arts are not sidelined. The value of music and its place in education must be recognised, respected and promoted. It is vital.”

• The OAE perform The King of the Sea at 11am on Saturday, September 10, at Acland Burghley School. They perform The Magic Flute for free at 1pm on Sunday September 11, at the York Rise Street Party.