Cover of the 2009 Festival Programme Book
© Fiona Rae, Courtesy, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.
The Festival Programme book is the essential companion to every audience member with its mixture of useful information and illuminating articles written by the opera world’s most esteemed academics. It covers all six operas in the season in a lavishly illustrated perfect bound edition of 135 pages, 31 x 24 cm.
The Festival Programme Book in its present format was started in 1952 and was the idea of Micki Seckers (whose company West Cumberland Silk Mills gave many of the fabrics for Don Giovanni) with the aim of raising an important source of revenue by asking companies within British industry to take pages of advertising.
It has long been a Glyndebourne tradition to invite a distinguished artist of the day to design the cover of the programme; Osbert Lancaster, David Hockney, Peter Doig, Anish Kapoor, and Chris Ofili are just a few of the great artists whose work has graced the cover. British artist Fiona Rae has created the cover for this year's 75th Anniversary Festival Programme.
Fiona Rae was born in Hong Kong in 1963, and graduated from Goldsmiths College, London in 1987. Since then she has been developing a complex, powerful and highly individual body of work which has been shown in numerous exhibitions around the world and is held in prestigious public collections.
Rae employs a battery of painterly marks, graphic signs and symbols that jostle for space on the fictive plane of her painting. She revels in juxtaposing elements gleaned from a raid on art history’s store cupboard, whether Abstract Expressionism, Tachism, or Minimalism, alongside contemporary global references from graphic design and popular culture. These sometimes unsettling combinations have an ambiguous mood, conjuring visions of an interweaved heavenly hell or hellish heaven – all the while demonstrating the pure joy of paint itself.
Ordering
Programme books can be purchased and delivered in advance of your visit by telephoning + 44 (0)1273 813813 10am – 6pm Monday to Sunday.