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US Premiere of Toshio Hosokawa's The Raven at Gotham Chamber Opera

May. 01, 2014

US Premiere of Toshio Hosokawa's <em>The Raven</em> at Gotham Chamber Opera

Gotham Chamber Opera presents the US premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s haunting setting of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven on May 28, 30 and 31 as part of the New York Philharmonic’s Biennial Festival. 

Hosokawa’s monodrama captures the gothic and macabre storytelling of Poe, drawing otherworldly colors from a compact orchestration of 12 players. Hosokawa recognized a connection between The Raven and the style of Japanese “Noh” plays, which he took as a point of departure for his musical setting: 

When I read The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, it reminded me of a Japanese Noh play. A view of the world in the Noh is not anthropocentric. Some of the main characters in the Noh are animals and plants, and some are unearthly spirits. Poe describes the process of the collapse of the modern rational world, as a consequence of an invasion of the world by a weird animal ‘raven’ which lives in the other world. I considered this poem as a story of Noh and expressed it in the form of monodrama… 

The Raven is dedicated to mezzo-soprano Charlotte Hellekant who premiered the piece in 2012 to an enraptured audience at La Raffinerie in Brussels. The US premiere features mezzo-soprano Fredrika Brillembourg and prima ballerina assoluta Alessandra Ferri, led by conductor Neal Goren and director/choreographer/scenic designer Luca Veggetti.

Please visit www.schott-music.com for more information on Toshio Hosokawa. 

For tickets and information, visit www.gothamchamberopera.org.

Toshio Hosokawa
The Raven (2011-2012)
monodrama for mezzo-soprano and 12 players
text (Eng) based on “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe
afl(pic, fl, bfl).bcl(cl).tsax(asax)-tpt.tbn-perc-pno-str(1.1.1.1.1)
45’

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