Archive for Alastair White

Announcing Alastair White’s RUNE fashion-opera

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
Scene from RUNE © Jarno Leppanen/Ka Wa Key

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

Premiere Performance of RUNE by Alastair White

On 17th August 2021 at the Round Chapel, in London, Alastair White’s RUNE fashion-opera will receive it’s world premiere performance as part of the Tête à Tête Festival. There will also be an interactive broadcast of the show on 17th September. Learn more and purchase tickets at tete-a-tete.org.uk

Re-opening theatre doors with a grand fashion-opera spectacle, RUNE is a vast cosmological fantasy from the team behind the award-nominated ROBE (“excellent” – BBC Music) and WEAR (“spellbinding” – Boulezian) — featuring an ensemble of three grand pianos, contemporary dance with interactive sculpture, and high fashion by Ka Wa Key.

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…

The interactive broadcast will include a Q&A with the creative team.

Supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Hope Scott Trust, the Marchus Trust, the Royal Musical Association, the RVW Trust and the Sarah Caple Scholarship.

Alastair White on Métier

Announcing Alastair White’s ‘fashion-opera’ WOAD

WOAD Press Image
WOAD © Renli Su

In the medieval Scottish Borders, a young boy is bewitched – into the form of an ape, an adder, a speck of dust. But is it his shape that twists and churns, or that of the world around him? WOAD is a fashion-opera about metamorphosis and parallel worlds – from the team behind the groundbreaking WEAR (“spellbinding…an opera of rare imagination” – Boulezian) and ROBE (“highly inventive…wonderfully original” – Artmuse London). Created with the award-winning soprano Kelly Poukens and international saxophonist Suzy Vanderheiden, Alastair White’s WOAD adapts the Scots myth of Tamlane to ask: in a multiverse of endless possibility, what becomes of our potential, our regret?

The work will have its world premiere stage performance in Belgium in March 2022 using Poukens’ experimental theatricality alongside the high fashion of designer Renli Su in a live digital event.

This world premiere recording will be released by Métier Records in late 2021 (MÉTIER  MSV 28617) on CD and Hi-Res digital download and streaming.

Alastair White explains, “Tamlane is a traditional myth of metamorphosis which, through its imagery, can be read as an exploration of the mutable, transformative nature of the body: how, in adolescence, for example, our bodies are recast and divided through time as a series of separate versions of ourselves. In WOAD, these ideas are used to aestheticise the social implications of the multiverse: where versions of events coexist in different areas and types of space. The work contextualises this against the backdrop of the social change foregrounded by the current health crisis, relating the themes of metamorphoses and quantum ‘flickering’ to socio-historical revolution and the possibility of a break with the horrors of multinational capitalism.

“The piece engages these themes by further developing the compositional methodology devised in the creation of WEAR and ROBE. For this particular piece, we attempted to create a sense of material objectivity in the phenomenological apprehensions of the listener. This is achieved through the overlay of different compositional methodologies that each imply mutually exclusive approaches of listening. It is hoped that this interpretive complexity allows the listener a series of different paths and perspectives: a constantly changing experience that is marked by the collapse of other possibilities. This was expanded throughout the process in collaboration with Kelly and Suzy, where we attempted to radically incorporate contingency into every aspect of the work. We are trying to find a way of dramatising absolute change, and the potential this implies, without it being neutralised to mere indeterminacy or simply another referent within the work’s limits.”

Kelly Poukens and Suzy Vanderheiden
Kelly Poukens and Suzy Vanderheiden © Kelly Poukens

Kelly Poukens is an international artist whose recent highlights include Regan in King Lear (Holland Opera) and solo recitals at the Henry Le Boeuf Hall. Saxophonist Suzy Vanderheiden’s distinguished career sees her tour worldwide, currently as a soloist with her saxophone quartet and in the Royal Harmonie Tessenderlo. Shortlisted for several Scottish art awards, composer-librettist Alastair White’s work is characterised by a lyrical complexity described as “virtuosic” (Winnipeg Free Press), “passionately atonal” (Gramophone) and “deftly manic” (American Record Guide). Renli Su is a globally-recognised fashion designer whose collections are characterised by her sense of nostalgia: where a love for old craftsman’s techniques is balanced with innovative, modern methods. Fashion curator Gemma A. Williams is author of Fashion China (Thames & Hudson). WOAD is produced by UU Studios, a fashion-opera collective co-founded by Williams and White.

Métier Records to release fashion-opera, ROBE, by Alastair White

A posthuman fantasia about cities, virtual reality and the A.I. singularity: ROBE is an award-nominated opera inspired by fashion and machines. This new (world premiere) recording will be released by Métier Records in late 2020/early 2021. (MÉTIER  MSV 28609). An audio recording which will be available on CD and Hi-Res digital download and streaming, it will be supported by promotional video shorts – the label hopes for a full staged video version in the future. An opera in form, it is also beautifully choreographed and is visually stunning.

Story

Descending into the mind of the superintelligence EDINBURGH, a young cartographer is tasked with mapping this creature so as to grant its desire: to become a living city, teeming with human life and activity. But they grow close, and she weaves into the map those things that cannot be known or spoken: the hidden histories of joy and longing each privately our own. As these rifts in the structure undo causality itself, she must answer the question: what exactly has she created?

About

Alastair White headshot
Alastair White © Alastair White

“Music is an ancient, powerful technology,” says composer-librettist Alastair White. “In ROBE we’re trying to explore the idea that virtual reality has existed since the dawn of time: in the way that books, theatres – even the clothes we wear –  transform and augment our perception of the world. And, how music has this astonishing power to contain and combine its participants – audiences, performers, writers – into a type of artificial superintelligence. “

This first full studio recording features the original cast from the 2019 UU Studios production at Tête-à-Tête festival, where the opera was shortlisted for a Creative Edinburgh Award and won praise for the ways in which it “successfully evoked the strange abstract world of cyberspace, creating a real sense of non-reality…The performances from all concerned were excellent.” (Planet Hugill).

People

Alastair White is a Scottish composer and writer whose work is characterised by a lyrical complexity that draws influence from materialism, fashion, cosmology and computers. Previous work includes 2018’s WEAR, shortlisted for a Scottish Award for New Music: “an opera of rare imagination and success” (Mark Berry, Boulezian). Produced at Goldsmiths Music Studios by Henri Växby (French For Cartridge), this release features a cast of rising stars from the new music scene: virtuosic pianist and music director Ben Smith (ROH, Wigmore Hall, Barbican), experimental flautist Jenni Hogan (Barbican, Radio 3, Queen Elizabeth Hall), Clara Kanter (Wigmore Hall, St Martin-in-the-Fields, BBC), the “theatrically and vocally excellent” (Opera Magazine) Kelly Poukens, “staggeringly good” (New Statesman) Rosie Middleton and Sarah Parkin, described as “a joy to watch” (The Times). 

This recording has been supported by Help Musicians UK, the Hinrichsen Foundation and the Goldsmiths Graduate Fund and Music Research Committee.

RECORDED IN JANUARY 2020.

ROBE Stage Photo
© Alastair White

ROBE Synopsis (duration c. 80 minutes)

In a society where difference between the real and the virtual is no longer meaningful, a powerful new being threatens the stability which holds these worlds together. Two elders, Neachneohain and Beira, convince the young cartographer Rowan to complete a terrible task: descend into the mind of the superintelligence EDINBURGH and map this creature so as to grant its desire – to become a living city, teeming with human life and activity. Witnessing visions of the awful realness of life beyond cyberspace, Rowan agrees – plunging into its depths: a strange, abstractworld of data and dream.

30 years later, Rowan and EDINBURGH have fallen in love, have lived their lives together. Though every morning she awakes with no memory of the past, Rowan has almost completed the map that EDINBURGH desires. But into this map Rowan has woven something else: something hidden, silent, unsaid. As these rifts in the structure undo causality itself, she must answer the question: what exactly has she created? And what does it have to do with this strange, otherworldly figure who sings the red song of a forgotten city – of an ancient, poisoned ROBE…