Your events at Classical Events
Details
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall
St James's
City of Westminster
London
SW1Y 5AH
England
Programme
Kate Whitley – Unknown Position
Michael Nyman – The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
Performers
Raphaela Papadakis – soprano
Paul Curievici – Tenor
Joseph Padfield – Bass
City Music Foundation
Programme Note
An opera double bill presenting Michael Nyman's minimalist The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986) and Kate Whitley's Unknown Position (2011).
Originally premiered in London at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1986, this new production of Nyman’s The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat will return to the same venue, 31 years later.
Nyman’s The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is adapted by librettist Christopher Rawlence from a case study by Oliver Sacks, the renowned neurologist who died last year, concerning events of Dr P, a music professor, who has gradually lost the ability to comprehend or interpret what he sees, a neurological deficit known as ‘visual agnosia’.
Whitley’s Unknown Position was inspired by Erika Eiffel, who famously married the Eiffel Tower in a real life example of object sexuality or objectophila. In the libretto, by Emma Hogan, the woman portrayed falls in love with a chair.
Central to each opera are elegiac moments of musical insight into the unknown territory of how the characters experience life. In Dr P’s beautiful ‘River’ aria, he describes “seeing” a scene which is in fact completely within his mind, and in Unknown Position the stunning love aria subverts the normal, as the love object of the serenade is a chair.
Tickets for the pre-performance panel discussion are available separately.
