Are you free on March 3rd? The circus is in town…

Happy birthday John Cage.

Did you know that 2012 is John Cage’s centenary year? Well, it is. And here at ENO we’re having a bit of a celebration which you are welcome to join in.

You can participate in many ways…

1) Come to the event.

2) Don’t come to the event.

3) Run a chance operation on the above to determine your participation. (Toss a coin)

OR

4) You can record your own version of 4’33” and send a link or file to baylis@eno.org. We’ll pick a winner using chance operations (as yet to be determined…) and play the winning soundtrack as part of Musicircus at ENO on March 3rd.

Good luck! (Or perhaps ‘bon chance’ is more appropriate…)

So, to help us prepare and get into the spirit of John Cage’s musical world, we invited composer and broadcaster Robert Worby to come in and explain Cage’s seminal work usually known as 4’33”. 

HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN 4’33” by Robert Worby

The best course of action for anyone wanting to perform a piece of notated music is to look at the score. The work by John Cage usually known as 4’33” is notated and the notation is clear and concise. The piece is in three movements or ‘parts’ as Cage refers to them. The parts are labelled I, II, III in Roman numerals, and the instruction for each part is ‘TACET’. Tacet is the conventional musical term for ‘Be silent’. It does not mean ‘Do nothing’ which is a common misconception.

Underneath the score there is a note which says that the title of the work is the total length in minutes and seconds of its performance and that at the first performance on August 29, 1952 it was performed by the pianist David Tudor and its title was 4’33” because the durations of the three movements totalled 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage goes on to say that the work may be performed by any instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and it may last any length of time. So, the work is known as 4’33” only because it was four minutes and thirty three seconds at its first performance and, in fact, the work may be of any duration.

In the score Cage does not specify how long each of the movements should be so the performer needs to determine the duration of each movement. Then some method of indicating the beginning and the end of each movement needs to be established. At the first performance, David Tudor closed the piano lid at the beginning of each movement and opened it at the end so this visual cue gave clear indication of the passage of time. If a performer is making a realisation for a non-visual medium then some other method of indicating the movements needs to be found.

In a recent realisation I made for BBC Radio 3 I used a single ‘pip’ from the Greenwich Mean Time signal to indicate the beginning and end of each of the three parts of the piece. In the realisation I have made for ENO I have used the voice of John Cage. When talking he often uttered the sound ‘Umm’ to emphasise a point or to enquire if you were following him. Using sound to indicate the three parts of the piece may throw up a contradiction because this work is known as Cage’s silent piece. However, once a movement has begun then no sound is made.

To remain within the spirit of Cage’s ideas and work the durations of the movements should be calculated using what he called ‘chance operations’, procedures that organised things by chance. His procedures included consulting the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese oracle, random number tables and star maps superimposed with musical manuscript paper. In my realisation for ENO I used a graphic score by Cage entitled ‘Variations I’ and the three durations it produced were 0’46”, 1’00” and 1’21” so the title of my realisation, which you can listen to here, is 3’07”.

This work is one of the most misunderstood and misconstrued pieces of all time and it has probably had its fair share of bad performances but if a performer engages with the ideas and spends time making their realisation then the results will be fruitful, enriching and illuminating.

© 2011 Robert Worby

Admission to Musicircus on March 3rd at the London Coliseum is free but you must have a ticket, which you can book on the ENO website.

Tom Morris on The Death of Klinghoffer

We caught up with Tom Morris, director of ENO’s The Death of Klinghoffer (making it’s London stage premiere next year at the London Coliseum). Morris is a passionate advocate of the opera which takes as its subject the real-life hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro by Palestinian militants and the murder of the ship’s only male jewish passenger, Leon Klinghoffer.

Here’s what Morris had to say about the opera and what atracted him to take on the direction of the UK’s premiere.

For Morris, the power of the opera, and what makes it ‘unusual’, is its balance of emphasis:

“what [John Adams and Alice Goodman have done] is to respond sympathetically to whatever they can sense of the humanity of whichever character they are writing for, actually in the way that any great dramatist would, but because this is a political story, and because some of the characters are hijackers, some people would call them terrorists, this becomes unnerving for an audience but that’s what they do and that’s the strength of it and there’s a conversation in the middle of the opera where the captain of the ship that’s been hijacked says to one of the hijackers ‘if you could talk like this sitting among your enemies then peace would come.’”

And why the ENO?

“Some people assume that opera is a backward looking, tired, if you like, the kind of art form that you can only possibly be interested in if you are over 55 and I think the thing that drives [artistic director] John Berry at the ENO is an instinct that Opera can be urgent, relevant, surprising, questioning, and feel immediate for the right audience if it’s presented in the right way.”

The Death of Klinghoffer opens on 25 February for 7 performances, click here for more details and booking.

Enter the weird and wonderful world of the Richard Jones’s Hoffmann

This February sees ENO bring a major new production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann to the London Coliseum stage. Following his Olivier Award-nominated Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, Richard Jones returns to ENO to turn his vivid imagination to this fantastical story of love.

The Tales of Hoffmann are interlinked stories of the writer Hoffmann’s loves, thwarted by the jealous muse of poetry, and a sinister nemesis – a multiple role played by the same singer. The opera begins in a tavern where Hoffmann drunkenly recounts the stories of three lost loves.

The first is Olympia, a life-like mechanical doll, who is literally torn apart by her cruel co-creator, Dr Coppélius.

The second is the Venetian whore Giulietta, who meets her fate in the arms of Hoffmann having been poisoned by Dapertutto, the nemesis who intended to steal Hoffmann’s reflection.

Hoffmanns final love is Antonia, a former lover with a mysterious disease which will kill her if she sings: Hoffmann’s enemy, Dr Miracle, offers Antonia’s father a cure for his daughter, but it’s a trick to cause her death and blame Hoffmann.

A Co-production with Bayerische Staatsoper, the production was staged in Munich earlier this year. 

Jones’s staging does away with Hoffmann as the garrulous drunk entertaining his sizzled friends and forces us in to his addled head instead. The major strength of this concept is how cleverly Jones builds unity out of the three acts and Hoffmann’s three women, helped by some suitable-wizard designs and costumes by Giles Cadle and Buki Shiff respectively
The Times, 3 November 2011

A riot of colour and invention, this production features Barry Banks as the lovelorn hero, and young American soprano Georgia Jarman sings all three of Hoffmann’s lost loves – a feat few sopranos today can match.

Click here for more info and to book tickets.

Fantasy Opera

While paying a visit to the London Coliseum, Terry Gilliam mentioned that his 1985 film Brazil would make a good opera. This got us talking in the office about our own ‘fantasy operas’ - dream couplings of concepts with composers. Interested to see what our followers could come up with, we asked them for suggestions of what could be great operas.

Some great ideas came back. As well as a lot of enthusiasm for Brazil, with nominations for Stephen Sondheim or Torsten Rasch (who composed ENO’s Punchdrunk collaboration The Duchess Of Malfi) to write the music, there was also a suggestion for an opera of The Fisher King - another Terry Gilliam film.

We’re big fans of Thomas Adès, so we were very happy to see a suggestion for him to adapt Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina into an opera (although we should also point out that it is already a ballet - to be performed at the London Coliseum by Eifman Ballet in April).

In the office the suggestions came thick and fast: The Crucible, The Cuban Missile Crisis (John Adams composing), Metropolis (Thomas Adès), The Social Network (Nico Muhly), while our social networks buzzed with ideas: Citizen Kane (Mark Anthony Turnage), Blade Runner (Ryuichi Sakamoto (with a libretto by novelist David Mitchell)), and even Cidade de Deus (City of God).

Some seemingly fantastical ideas have already been realised as operas: Mice and Men (Carlisle Floyd) and Julian Assange, the Opera (Jonathan Dreyfus)! Definitely one to keep an eye out for…

Eugene Onegin Audience Reactions

We caught up with some of our audience members after the dress rehearsal of Eugene Onegin, here’s our updated trailer of this critically acclaimed production.

You can find out more about Eugene Onegin here

Edward Gardner on Eugene Onegin

Edward Gardner explores Eugene Onegin with Edward Seckerson

ENO Talks: Edward Gardner and Edward Seckerson on Eugene Onegin by englishnationalopera

Find out more about the production here

Eugene Onegin Rehearsals

Crew and actors stand on stage during a small break in the rehearsal.

Photo by Charlotte van Berckel

Find out more about EUGENE ONEGIN here

Castor and Pollux Trailer

Hot off the press comes the trailer for Castor and Pollux.

Find out more about this new production of Rameau’s masterpiece here

Barrie Kosky and Christian Curnyn on Castor & Pollux

Independent Classical: Barrie Kosky and Christian Curnyn by The Independent on Mixcloud

Edward Seckerson (The Independent) talks to Barrie Kosky and Christian Curnyn in the run up to the opening of Castor and Pollux at the ENO.

Eugene Onegin Costume Sketches

Here’s a quick preview of costume designer Chloe Obolensky’s exquisite costumes for Eugene Onegin.