AUDITORIUM

29 September 2007 - 6 January 2008

A film by Sophy Rickett with an original music score composed by Ed Hughes that celebrates Glyndebourne Opera House.

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’s 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. Find out more here.

Co-commissioned with Glyndebourne Opera House, Sussex and the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill.

AUDITORIUM was shown as part of the exhibition season Triple Echo, at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill in winter 2007. You can download the programme here.

AUDITORIUM was also presented as a live performance at Glyndebourne on 17 November 2007 with Ed Hughes’s musical score played by the South Downs Youth Orchestra, conducted by Malcolm Warnes.

AUDITORIUM toured to Ffotogallery, Cardiff from 26 April to 8 June 2008.

It was screened at Tate Modern on 7 March 2008, and has also shown at the Galleria Civica di Modena in Modena, Italy; at Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea in Turin, Italy and Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

It is showing at Brancolini Grimaldi, London from 7 July to 27 August 2011.

AUDITORIUM was shortlisted for a British Composer Award in 2008, with extracts broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

AUDITORIUM was accompanied by the education project Photo-operative. Follow the links in More to Explore below to find out about this inspiring project and watch the students' work.

Below is an extract of Auditorium and a film made of South Downs Youth Orchestra as they record the score for the film.