Three music works presented visually by Cryptic and performed by The Scottish Ensemble and Tenebrae as part of the celebrations of Scottish Ensemble’s 40th Anniversary and James MacMillan’s 50th birthday.
Cryptic has commissioned visual artists James Houston and Angelica Kroeger to collaborate with director Cathie Boyd to design the accompanying visuals for these concerts. Houston and Boyd will work together to create a video for MacMillan’s Seven Last Words (Cantata for choir and strings) while Kroeger and Boyd will produce a short film for Nigel Osborne’s commission, Seven Words, Seven Icons, Seven Cities. Boyd will further enhance the concerts with subtle lighting.
Cathie Boyd studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. As the founder, in 1994, of Cryptic, she has produced and directed all performances to date. Other credits include Gounod’s Faust, Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Sciarrino’s Infinito Nero, Kurtág’s Scenes from a Novel, Stravinksy’s Firebird with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Stockhausen’s Trans with the Southbank Centre. In 2001, Cathie was made a Fellow of NESTA, to develop the visual staging of music through new technologies and subsequently has developed a programme titled seeingmusic.
James Houston is a recent graduate of Glasgow School of Art. His haunting remix of Radiohead’s Nude, employing an old scanner, a dot matrix printer, old hard drives and a ZX spectrum, has received over a million online views and won the acclaim of the band and resulted in the offer of a record deal, despite not even being a musician. He recently was awarded a BAFTA New Talent Award 2008 for his music video Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any). His recent projects include a music video for the London indie rock band Official Secrets Act – So Tomorrow.
Angelica Kroeger was born in Germany where she worked as an assistant director and later as a director. She later worked in lighting design, sound and moved towards AV, having collaborated for many years with Giacomo Ravicchio at Meridiano Theatre in Copenhagen, which is renowned for its magical visual style. In Scotland, Angelica worked with various companies as technical stage manager, responsible for sound and relighting as well as AV consultation. For the past three years she has been focusing on developing her visual art.
Perth Concert Hall
01/04/2010
19:30
Box Office: 01738 621 031
Buy tickets online
Glasgow City Halls
02/03/2010
19:30
Box Office: 0141 353 8000
Buy tickets online
City of London Festival
St Andrews Holborn, London
07/07/2009
Premiere