RUNE

Announcing Alastair White’s RUNE fashion-opera

Following the acclaimed release of Alastair White’s (Tait Awardee 2021) ‘fashion-operas’ ROBE and WOAD, the Tait Memorial Trust is delighted to announce the forthcoming release of RUNE, in collaboration with the Divine Art team, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival, 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). This exciting new work will be available to view here until the 28th February with our Tait family by permission of the composer.

Due out in Summer 2022, the album is a live recording of RUNE’s world premiere at the Hackney Round Chapel in 2021, 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).

Scene from RUNE © Jarno Leppanen/Ka Wa Key

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…

“Unquestionably my highlight. Glittering, lyrical, highly logical, yet capricious…a melding of physical and metaphysical, of quantum mechanics and spatial manifestation.” – Mark Berry, Seen and Heard International

“Genuinely original…Fashion-opera has enormous capacity as a progressive genre; it is ambitious, uncompromising, unapologetically Marxian, positively vibrating with queer potentiality and never ever trite.” – George K. Haggett, TEMPO
“A perfect combination of show and costume” – Alberto Calabrese, Vogue Italia
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…

You can find a libretto for RUNE here

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Kes’Cha’Au: Patricia Auchterlonie
Khye-Rell: Simone Ibbett-Brown

Music Director: Ben Smith
Film: Hannah Lovell
Camera: Barry Hoffman and Damien Naimad
Sound: Chris Tanton

Piano: Joseph Havlat
Piano: Siwan Rhys
Piano: Ben Smith

Dancers:
Ryan Appiah-Sarpong
Max Gershon
Shakeel Kimotho
Thomas Page

Words and Music: Alastair White
Director: Gemma A. Williams
Director: Jarno Leppanen
Fashion: Ka Wa Key
Sculpture: Sid the Salmon

Hair: Maria Kovacs, Readytowearhairdressing
Assisted by: John Harte, Chris Harris-Gibbs and Evelina Lundgren
Makeup: Michelle Strain, AOFMPro, using Dermalogica
Assisted by: Alina Antofe, Laura Hahnel, Matilda Jose and Richa Khatana

Alastair White’s Fashion-Operas

Biography for Alastair White

Alastair White is a New Zealand/Scottish composer and writer.

Described as “spellbinding” (Boulezian), “beautiful” (730 Review), “virtuosic” (Winnipeg Free Press), “deftly manic (American Record Guide) and “passionately atonal” (Gramophone), his work is characterised by a lyrical complexity which draws influence from technology, science, politics and materialism. Recent projects include the fashion-operas WEAR, ROBE (Métier Records February ’21) and WOAD; a string quartet for the Altius Quartet’s album Quadrants Vol. 3 (Navona Records); the documentary opera A Boat in an Endless Blue Sea; WORK: movement through a series of arbitrary partitions for .abeceda; and The Drowning Shore, a Scots-Yiddish cantata.

Shortlisted for a Scottish Award for New Music twice (in 2019 and 2020) and a Creative Edinburgh Award (2019), Alastair has created work for the opera festivals Tête-a-Tête and Opera in the City, the international poetry festival STanza, UKNA City Takeover, Compass Presents, The Scottish School of Contemporary Dance and The Scottish Poetry Library.

His music is supported by Help Musicians UK, the Hinrichsen Foundation, Marchus Trust, The Tait Memorial Trust, Goldsmiths Graduate Fund, and Music Research Committee.

Alastair was a founding member of the Edinburgh-based bands White Heath (Electric Honey) and Blank Comrade (Red Wharf), and has worked as a session pianist and producer. He is currently undertaking a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London with Roger Redgate and Lauren Redhead, where he organised the interdisciplinary conference on New Materialism Futures of the Real. He publishes and speaks internationally on his research interests, which include the development of an original materialist philosophy, ‘Contingency Dialectics,’ and its methodological implications in Fashion-Opera.