Following the acclaimed release of Alastair White’s ‘fashion-operas’ ROBE and WOAD, the Divine Art team is delighted to announce the forthcoming release of RUNE, in collaboration with UU Studios and designer house Ka Wa Key. RUNE is the third in the series of recordings (and actually the fourth of White’s operas including WEAR, still to be recorded).

Due out in Summer 2022, the album is a live recording of RUNE’s world premiere at the Hackney Round Chapel earlier this year, which critics called “perfect” (Vogue Italia), “blockbuster…explosive” (Opera Magazine), “spectacular in every sense of the word” (Caroline Potter) and “unquestionably my highlight…a melding of physical and metaphysical, of quantum mechanics and spatial manifestation” (Mark Berry, Boulezian, Seen and Heard International).

RUNE is a vast cosmological fantasy created in collaboration with the London fashion house Ka Wa Key, featuring an ensemble of three grand pianos conducted by Ben Smith. Smith performs alongside other star pianists Joseph Havlat and Siwan Rhys, as well as the “especially impressive” (The Guardian) Patricia Auchterlonie and the “fierce, fearless and cerebral” (The Guardian) Simone Ibbet-Brown. It is recorded and produced by Chris Tanton.

On a planet where history is forbidden, a young girl dares to tell her story. A voyage across galaxies and millennia, hers is a tale of the archipelagos of Khye-rell and their matterwork, through transdimensional canals and sealanes to the RUNE of the universe’s origin. This song, her story — through the very act of being told — will have consequences beyond imagining…

Fashion-Opera is a new discipline proposed by White in a cycle of four works — WEAR, ROBE, WOAD and RUNE — as the methodological realisation of his theory of ‘contingency dialectics.’ BBC Radio 3 has hailed it as “a whole exciting new genre of art”, with previous releases described as “excellent” (BBC Music Magazine, on ROBE) “the height of compositional magnificence” (Fanfare, on WOAD) and “spellbinding…an opera of rare imagination —and success (Boulezian, on WEAR).

Devised with the fashion curator Gemma A Williams, as well as music directors Ben Smith and Kelly Poukens, and showcasing designers such as Derek Lawlor, Michael Stewart, Renli Su and Tommy Zhong, the operas premiered as part of Tête-à-Tête: The Opera Festival and are now being released by Métier as studio albums. RUNE finishes the cycle in a grand fashion-opera spectacle that at its premiere featured the debut of an original capsule collection from Ka Wa Key, as well as contemporary dancers Ryan Appiah-Sarpong, Max Gershon, Shakeel Kimotho and Thomas Page performing with interactive sculpture by Sid the Salmon.

White explains, “RUNE is inspired by how the arbitrary sequencing of language, quantum states and interpersonal relations are fundamentally linked: through our endlessly creative ability to transform their disassociation into generous, open, infinite meanings – from the RUNE’s lifeless inertia to its tracing in voyages, songs, and love. RUNE is a hymn to the power of these meanings as bridges between people: and a call to their importance in light of the dark and difficult century that lies ahead.”

Co-Director Gemma A. Williams continues, “the opera is based on the hypothesis that, in the moments following the big bang, the universe passed through a subatomic state and that here the arbitrary fluctuations of quantum data imprinted upon it: like a rune. As the universe expanded, this printed, frozen fluctuation became the inconsistencies in the emptiness of cold space, which in turn became matter, galaxies, life, thought, language.”

The Ka Wa Key RUNE capsule collection is part of their SS22: the first capsule collection to be launched as part of an opera. Designer and co-director Jarno Leppanen says how it was “inspired by the opera’s epic intimacy and fluidity. Through this, we wanted to show the power of love beyond gender, with kaleidoscopic, marble-like patterns and iridescent shine: floaty, dreamy and bittersweet.”

RUNE (MSV 28265)

Release: Summer 2022 on Métier

Composer: Alastair White

Artists: Patricia Auchterlonie (soprano), Simone Ibbett-Brown (mezzo-soprano), Ben Smith, Joesph Havlat, Siwan Rhys (three-piano ensemble)

Live Production Recording

RUNE is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Hope Scott Trust, the Marchus Trust, the Royal Musical Association, the RVW Trust, the Sarah Caple Scholarship and Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival.

Alastair White’s Fashion-Operas