A film by Sophy Rickett with an original music score composed by Ed Hughes that celebrates Glyndebourne Opera House.
This film was exhibited between 29th September 2007 – 6th January 2008
Glyndebourne’s new opera house is a striking modernist landmark set against the rolling Sussex Downs. It is also the vehicle for Glyndebourne’s internationally renowned and complex opera productions. These involve the coordinated work of singers, musicians, designers, technicians and producers, as well as the planning and synchronization of a mechanical operation on an industrial scale.
Sophy Rickett and Ed Hughes’ film goes to the heart of this vast production machine. Bringing together the artists’ common interest in modernist forms and values in art, it also strongly echoing Rickett’s earlier photographic work. The film explores Glyndebourne as a physical site and as a place of music and performance with a rich and celebrated history.
The film uncompromisingly strips back the operatic space to its architectural and theatrical core. It reveals another more minimal drama of spatial plays and simple, slow movement that transforms the interior of the building in a monumental caress of light and shadow.
Hughes’s musical score overlays the film’s formal, grid-like structures with its own elements of line and rhythm. The inclusion of found sound and vocal passages add further dimensions of musical space and colour. In this way the music reconnects the film to a sense of narrative that resonates with a history of operatic performance.
An fully illustrated book has now been published about the project which can be purchased from our Shop.
Below is an extract of Auditorium and a film made of South Downs Youth Orchestra as they record the score for the film.
