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Hi folks — I hope you are all well. As fellow Joyce enthusiasts, we wanted to invite you to the opening concert of our Finnegans Wake adaptation, which premieres at the London Irish Centre on the 5th of September. Be great to see some of you there!

Finnegans Wake: Here Comes Everybody

When: 7.30pm, 5th September 2026 | Where: The London Irish Centre | Tickets: https://londonirishcentre.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173674160

What: On 5 September, Ensemble Exposé and conductor Roger Redgate premiere Alastair White’s Finnegans Wake: Here Comes Everybody at the London Irish Centre. The performance launches an ambitious thirteen-year cycle adapting James Joyce's great modernist novel for the operatic stage, culminating in the book’s centenary in 2039.

Finnegans Wake is regarded as the world’s most controversial text — to some, unreadable, to others, a masterpiece. How do you adapt a book that resists all definition? Finnegans Wake: Here Comes Everybody is the beginning of such an experience: one that forgoes fixed form and delineation, that cannot be contained within a single iteration or instance, and which unfolds in years rather than minutes.

This first instalment — a one-hour reimagining of an operatic overture — is performed by veteran avant-gardists Roger Redgate and Ensemble Éxposé, a group recognised for championing the most challenging of contemporary music since its formation in 1984. Alastair White’s work has been described “a whole new exciting genre of art” (BBC Radio 3), and this ensemble of distinguished soloists bring his translation of Joyce’s rhythmic, fluid language to life in musical technicolour, including readings by RTÉ’s Cathal Murray. Produced by the Irish curator Gemma A. Williams, the project is supported by DCCI and created in partnership with the London Irish Centre.

White explains how, "central to the adaptation’s approach is a radical re-reading of Finnegans Wake and the modernist canon: that authors such as Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway continue to be misread through romantic and post-modern analyses that see them as depths rather than surfaces. The project contends that — like the sparse prose of Hills Like White Elephants — Finnegans Wake has been ill-used by approaches that attempt to 'decode' it through what is absent: in ignorance of the sheer joy that the language embodies. There is no iceberg, no skeleton key; Finnegans Wake is not a cipher. It is only itself."

Ensemble Exposé was formed in 1984 by the composers Richard Barrett, Roger Redgate and Michael Finnissy. The group has given extensive concerts and broadcasts throughout Europe and has appeared at many of the major festivals on new music in France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy and Sweden as well as appearing at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The ensemble records regularly for the BBC and has broadcast on Radio France, Dutch Radio, Hessische Rundfunks, RAI (Italy) and Swedish Radio. It has been featured on BBC TV’s Omnibus and was a resident ensemble at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 1986, 1988, 1990 (when on each occasion prizes for both performance and composition were awarded to several of its members) and the International Bartok Festival and Seminar in Szombathely, Hungary. In 1995 the ensemble received a project grant from the London Arts Board for a series of concerts featuring the music of the American composer and improviser Anthony Braxton. Notable recordings include work by Michael Finnissy, Fabrice Fitch, Edwin Roxburgh, Roger Redgate and Brian Ferneyhough.

Alastair White is a Scottish composer and writer. His work is characterised by a lyrical complexity which has been described as "a whole exciting new genre of art” (BBC Radio 3), “ambitious, iconoclastic” (The Stage) and an attempt “to challenge long-held assumptions about the material world and to illuminate the performative nature of matter itself” (Opera Today). His music is available on several full-length releases from Métier and Navona, and his scores are published by UMP. As an author, ​he is represented by Salma Begum at Greyhound Literary and his debut novel is to be published in the autumn of 2026 by DUMBO Press. Recipient of the Tait Memorial Trust Award, and shortlisted twice for a Scottish Award for New Music (in 2019 and 2020) a Creative Edinburgh Award (2019), an Ivan Juritz Prize (2023) and The Stage Awards (2024), his music has been featured on Radio 3 and Klara Radio, and is supported by Design & Crafts Council Ireland, Help Musicians UK, The Hinrichsen Foundation, The Hope Scott Trust, The Marchus Trust, The Royal Musical Association, The RVW Trust, The Sarah Caple Scholarship, TONG, and The Goldsmiths Graduate School Fund and Music Research Committee. He teaches composition at the University of Surrey and holds a PhD in Music from Goldsmiths, University of London. At Slovenia's Inštitut .abeceda, he mentors composers from around the world in several annual workshops on music.

https://finneganswake100.com/