page 6 music news scotland SCOTTISH <strong>MUSIC</strong> CENTRE ......... Member Release :: Alastair White / RUNE shop @ www.divineartrecords.com/recording/rune-fashion-opera/ "The Scottish Music Centre's task is to champion the wealth of talent that abounds in <strong>Scotland</strong>'s musical community" Announcing the album release of Scottish Music Centre member Alastair White’s fourth Fashion-Opera, RUNE. Released on Friday 9 September, the album is a live recording of RUNE’s world premiere at the Hackney Round Chapel earlier this year — now with remastered sound — which critics called “perfect” (Vogue Italia), “blockbuster… explosive” (Opera Magazine), 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 Ibbett-Brown. It is recorded and produced by Chris Tanton, and comes with a booklet including both the libretto laid out in its original typographical design — as well as images of the capsule collection created especially for the opera. 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.’ It has been hailed as “a whole exciting new genre of art” (BBC Radio 3) and “a groundbreaking new genre” (Classical Music). 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, “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.” 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. Shakeel Kimotho :: image by Jarno Leppanen and Ka Wa Key www.alastairwhite.org www.twitter.com/AlWhiteMusic www.facebook.com/alastairwhitemusic The Scottish Music Centre currently supports in excess of <strong>10</strong>0 composer, group/small business and corporate members To find out more about the benefits of SMC membership, visit http://scottishmusiccentre.com/services/membership-schemes/ Scottish Music Centre’s City Halls office is currently closed due to Covid-19 and our staff and project teams are working from home. We have made changes to some of our services, please go to the individual page(s) on our website for more info. For general enquiries please contact us on info@scottishmusiccentre.com www.scottishmusiccentre.com : www.twitter.com/scottishmusic : www.facebook.com/scottishmusiccentre "The Scottish Music Centre's task is to champion the wealth of talent that abounds in <strong>Scotland</strong>'s musical community"
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