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Spoleto Festival USA Presents American Premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s Matsukaze; NY Premiere at Lincoln Center Festival in July

Apr. 29, 2013

Spoleto Festival USA Presents American Premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s <em>Matsukaze</em>; NY Premiere at Lincoln Center Festival in July

In Matsukaze, Toshio Hosokawa enlists a 15th-century Japanese Noh play as the basis for creating an ethereal, haunting music-theater experience that calls on both Noh and Western operatic traditions. Such balance of disparate artistic traditions is emblematic of Hosokawa’s artistic sensibility. A student of the European avant-garde, having spent his formative compositional years studying in Germany, while remaining emphatically well informed about traditional Japanese music and art, Hosokawa has set out to create a completely unique body of Japanese music through his distinct deployment of 20th-century Western music technique. Matsukaze, inspired by the popular 15th-century play created in part by Noh master Zeami, has its North American premiere performances at the 2013 Spoleto Festival USA, May 24, 26, June 1, 4 and 8, conducted by John Kennedy and directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. The opera recounts a dreamlike tale of a wondering monk confronted by two sister spirits, Matsukaze and Murasame, tormented by the memory of their abandoned lover. William Robin wrote in The New York Times following the opera's premiere in February, 2011: 

The chamber orchestra of Matsukaze… vividly conjured a wind-swept shore. The opera takes the form of a gigantic sonic arc, growing from the placid waves of the opening to Matsukaze’s harrowing vision, which is punctured by brassy explosions and hissing walls of sound, then fading back to the trembling stillness with which it began. Mr. Hosokawa employs the vernacular of the European avant-garde — spectral string glissandos, uncanny sprechstimme (speech-song) and murmuring, aleatoric percussion — to suggest the breath of the natural world, as important a character as either of the sisters.

New York audiences will not need to travel south this spring to catch Matsukaze as the Spoleto production travels north for its New York premiere at Lincoln Center Festival, July 18 through 20, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater.

Read the full review in The New York Times at www.nytimes.com.

Precise details on the production at Spoleto USA are located at ww.spoletousa.org.

Lincoln Center Festival performance details can be found at www.lincolncenterfestival.org.

Learn more on the life and work of Toshio Hosokawa at www.schott-music.com.

Toshio Hosokawa
Matsukaze (2011)
opera in one act
libretto (Ger) by Hannah Dübgen, based on Zeami’s "Matsukaze"
soprano, mezzo-soprano, bass, baritone, SATB Chorus
1(afl, bcl & pic).1(ca).2(2. bcl).1(cbsn)-1.1.1.1-2perc-hp.pno(cel)-str
80’

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