Ed Hughes World Premiere at Glyndebourne

Ed Hughes has been commissioned by Glyndebourne Education in partnership with Photoworks to collaborate with the visual artist Sophy Rickett and to produce music to accompany her film Auditorium.

The piece is created in response to the modern architecture of the new opera house at Glyndebourne, and the artists have been working towards a cinematic language that expresses the complex relationship between moving imagery, music and sound. The concert premiere will take place in the Glyndebourne opera house on November 17th, with a screening of the film accompanied by a live performance of Hughes' score, given by the South Downs Youth Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Warnes. The evening will also feature six new photography and sound pieces created by students from Brighton and Hove Sixth Form College and the East Sussex Academy of Music to be performed by the South Downs Youth Orchestra. The installation Auditorium will also feature as part of the Triple Echo exhibition at the De la Warr Pavilion from 29 September 2007 to 6 January 2008, with a pre recorded sound track.

Photoworks will publish a book in spring 2008 on this special project, including essays about the art works by Nicholas Till (Senior Lecturer in Music and Director of the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre, University of Sussex) and Chris Townsend (Senior Lecturer in Media Arts, Royal Holloway College, University of London), an extended interview with the artists, as well as full documentation of the project, the De la Warr exhibition and the Glyndebourne performance. A DVD of Auditorium will also be included. Ed Hughes is no stranger to writing music for films, and his soundtracks for the seminal Sergei Eisenstien films Strike and Battleship Potemkin are featured in a recently released DVD set on the Tartan Video label. The New Music Players are currently touring performances of Strike with live music accompanying the film - see the performance page of the website for more details.