Rock & Roll Hall of Famer/innovative electronic musician Brian Eno has not spent much time on the road over the course of his illustrious career. Eno will make up for lost time this fall when he embarks on his first-ever solo tour.
Eno will bring the Ships concert series to five European cities between October 21 and 30. Each show will include an orchestral adaptation of Brian Eno’s 2016 album, The Ship, entitled Ships, along with new and classic Eno compositions. La Biennale di Venezia commissioned Ships.
Brian Eno will be joined by the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, orchestrated and conducted by Kristjan Järvi. Not only will the run mark Brian Eno’s first live tour of his solo career, it will also be his first appearance with an orchestra.
The tour starts at Teatro la Fenice in Venice on October 21. Eno’s show comes as part of the Venice Biennale Musica, where he will be honored with the Golden Lion lifetime achievement award. The musician, the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, actor Peter Serafinowicz and longtime collaborators Leo Abrahams and Peter Chilvers then hit Berlin, Paris and Utrecht (The Netherlands) before the tour is currently set to close with a concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall on October 30.
Brian Eno shared a statement about the upcoming tour, noting:
“The Ship is an unusual piece in that it uses voice but doesn’t particularly rely on the song form. It’s an atmosphere with occasional characters drifting through it, characters lost in the vague space made by the music. There’s a sense of wartime in the background, and a sense of inevitability. There is also a sense of scale which suits an orchestra, and a sense of many people working together.
“I wanted an orchestra which played music the way I would like to play music: from the heart rather than just from the score. I wanted the players to be young and fresh and enthusiastic. When I first saw the Baltic Sea Philharmonic I found all that…and then noticed they were named after a sea. That sealed it!”
Tickets for Brian Eno’s first solo tour go on sale this Thursday, June 8 at 11 a.m. CET. Scroll below for the complete list.
