Auditorium (2007) Perusal Score
Commissioned by Glyndebourne and Photoworks
Orchestra: 333(+BCl)2.4220.3perc.Pf.Strings + 4 channel pre-recorded electronics
First performed by the Sussex Downs Youth Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Warnes on 17 November 2007 at Glyndebourne Opera House
Duration 20’
Auditorium is a film by Sophy Rickett and orchestral score by composer Ed Hughes. Sophy and Ed were co-commissioned by Photoworks, Glyndebourne Education and the De La Warr Pavilion to collaborate on a new work about Glyndebourne and worked on the project between 2005 and 17 November 2007, when it was screened in the Main House at Glyndebourne, with a live orchestra (Sussex Downs Youth Orchestra) and electronics diffused by Sound Intermedia.
The work’s incarnation as a live event was matched by a simultaneous installation of the piece at the De La Warr Pavilion, using two screens, four channel sound and two synchronised DVD players. This installation continued for three months in winter 2007/8. The work has since been installed internationally, including venues in Cardiff, Milan, and Tokyo, as well as numerous UK screenings including Tate Britain and Courtauld Institute. The piece was installed from 6 July to 27 August 2011 at Brancolini Grimaldi Gallery, Albermarle St, London.
The primary subject of Auditorium is the interior of Glyndebourne’s new opera house, designed by Michael Hopkins and Partners and opened in 1994. The building is a striking modernist landmark which both contrasts with and complements the rolling Sussex landscape. In responding to this building, and to Glyndebourne more generally, Sophy and Ed have been working towards a film language that expresses the complex relationship between moving imagery, music and sound. Both share an interest in modernist forms and in this new work they have been particularly inspired by the auditorium’s architecture and by the passage of light across the empty space as lighting is raised and lowered onto the stage.
The visual character of the film, in its emphasis on simple lines and geometric structures, strongly echoes Sophy’s photographic work. It also furthers her interest in theatrical illusion and the mechanics that create and control it. The film explores this idea by looking at the opera house as a vast production machine, constructing a minimal drama of spatial plays and simple, slow movement, which transforms the interior of the building in a monumental caress of light and shadow.
The music for Auditorium begins with the sounds of a virtual orchestra tuning up, before moving towards gently pulsating textues, where the main orchestra starts. At times the music darkens and becomes contrapuntal as more instruments are added. In the middle of the work, an electronic section with singing voices accompanies scenes in the grid of the opera house, which is located high up in the fly tower above the stage and is never seen by members of the audience. The singers are heard to articulate words from a chorus concerning the marriage between the mythic figures of Orpheus and Eurydice, the protagonists of the ‘founding’ opera L’Orfeo (1607) by Claudio Monteverdi:
Come, O Hymen, and let your torch be like a flaming sun that brings to these lovers their cloudless day; and far away now drives from them sorrow, pain, the horror and ghosts.
Orchestra silent film