Tagged with 'Toshio Hosokawa'

Talking cats, living teddy bears and flying fish - quite normal! At least in Toshio Hosokawa's children's play Your Friends From Afar (German original title “Deine Freunde aus der Ferne”). It will be performed in Germany for the first time on 3 March 2024. Members of the SWR Symphony Orchestra will perform the German premiere together with narrator Rainer Strecker at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

Genesis – creation is the title of Toshio Hosokawa's new Violin Concerto which he wrote for violinist Veronika Eberle. As part of the International Music Festival Hamburg, the world premiere will take place on 19 May 2021, 8 pm local time (6 pm UTC), after the date had to be postponed multiple times. It will be live streamed on the YouTube channel of the Philharmonic State Orchestra Hamburg, Kent Nagano is conducting.

"Veronika Eberle gave birth to a baby last November. I composed the piece as a present for
her and her baby. In the concerto, the soloist represents a human being, while the orchestra is imagined as nature and the universe surrounding him. At the beginning, the orchestra repeats wave motions suggestive of amniotic fluid, then the melodic line of the violin solo (= life) is generated from the inside of ‘cradle’, and is developing while imitating melodies inside the orchestra, then becomes independent of it, conflicts with it, however, finally finds a harmony inside the orchestra and dissolves into it." Toshio Hosokawa

Toshio Hosokawa
Violin Concerto
Genesis · 18’
19 May 2021 | Hamburg (D)
Elbphilharmonie
Veronika Eberle, violin
Philharmonic State Orchestera Hamburg
Kent Nagano, conductor

Commissioned by Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra, Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra (SOČR) and Grafenegg Festival

• Toshio Hosokawa – composer profile


• Live Stream on YouTube


• Website of the Philharmonic State Orchestra Hamburg

 

Toshio Hosokawa’s new piece, Texture for octet will be premiered at the Digital Concert Hall by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra on June 6th. The first performer is the Philharmonic Octet Berlin.

Texture was co-commissioned by the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation and the Japan Arts Corporation for the Philharmonic Octet Berlin, and is dedicated to the ensemble. The instrumentation of octet is the same as Octet D803 by Franz Schubert which is the ensemble’s specialty; clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin 2, viola, violoncello and double bass.

The instrumentation is divided into the following 2 groups; a group consisting of a string quartet and another consisting of clarinet, bassoon, horn and double bass. Each group plays melodies with a lively calligraphy-like shape, an unforced linear of the Eastern brushstrokes which is one of the characteristics of Hosokawa’s music. In this piece, like the Yin and Yang of the East, just as polar opposite elements, such as man and woman, high and low, strength and weakness, light and dark coexist and complete each other - become tied together without defeating the other, whilst gradually shaping the sound of the universe.

Toshio Hosokawa
Texture (2020)
for octet

World Premiere

June 6, 2020, 19:00  Philharmonie Berlin (Berlin, Germany)
June 7, 2020, 13:00  Philharmonie Berlin (Berlin, Germany) Broadcast from Digital Concert Hall by Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Philharmonic Octet Berlin (Wenzel Fuchs [clarinet], Mor Biron [bassoon], Stefan Dohr [horn], Daishin Kashimoto, Romano Tommasini [violin], Amihai Grosz [viola], Christoph Igelbrink [cello], Esko Laine [double bass])

• Toshio Hosokawa - Profile


• Digital Concert Hall

+++ After the following story was published, we learned that the concert and live-streaming had to be cancelled as well. +++

On 11 April, the NHK Symphony Orchestra will perform Toshio Hosokawa’s Meditation to the victims of Tsunami (3.11) as part of a livestream concert conducted by Masaru Kumakura. The concert has been organised to replace the orchestra’s scheduled public performance in response to ongoing restrictions of COVID-19. 

Born in Hiroshima following World War II, Hosokawa has composed a number of works (including Memory of the Sea and Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima) that express a deeply personal connection to those who have found themselves victims to disasters – both present and historical. Remarking that the Tohoku Earthquake on 11 March 2011 gave him pause to contemplate more deeply what it is ‘to live’, Hosokawa draws listeners’ attention to the strength of people in the face of the unimaginable.

In recent works, Meditation to the victims of Tsunami (3.11), a mourning for the victims of Tsunami, Klage, in which a mother could heal her deep sorrow by singing, and Nach dem Sturm depicting a flower that experienced storm gradually regaining the world of light, Hosokawa expressed fear of primitive power and the terror of nature, and the anger against irrationality that we are threatened by nuclear power we ourselves created. His work coexists with each of these, finding space between them to illuminate the resilience of humanity.

My musical idea is to find harmony between nature and humans. Therefore, the tsunami of 2011 was a great shock to me. Nature just isn’t only nice and beautiful, it can also be cruel sometimes. We Japanese seem to have lost our respect for nature. - Toshio Hosokawa

• Toshio Hosokawa - profile


• Mediation – work details and audio stream


• NHK Symphony Orchestra 

Toshio Hosokawa’s music straddles two cultures, with influences from traditional Japanese music and the world of European art music. This is evident in his new chamber opera, Futari Shizuka (The Two Shizukas), which will be premiered on 1 December at the Autumn Festival in Paris by Ensemble Intercontemporain with conductor Matthias Pintscher, soprano Kerstin Avemo and Nô performer Ryoko Aoki.


Futari Shizuka is a 12th century play from the Nô tradition, one of the four Japanese theatre traditions alongside Kyogen, Kabuki and Bunraku. Nô combines sets, dance, chanting, and masks with a fixed narrative structure to convey the story to audiences. With a new libretto by Japanese author Oriza Hirate, Hosokawa’s version of Futari Shizuka tells the story of Shizuka, a dancer whose ghost takes possession of a young refugee girl at the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Helene.

Futari Shizuka by Toshio Hosokawa: a fusion of the traditional and contemporary

Two musical cultures come literally face to face in Hosokawa’s opera with the role of Helene sung by a classically trained opera singer and Shizuka performed by a Nô artist.

Many artists in Japan want new art that shows underlying influences from Europe and America. Many Japanese intellectuals think it is remarkable when I talk about my Japanese influences. They say you do not need to do this because the world is one…but traditional Japanese music is very different and I stand between Japan and Europe, which I find hard and I feel alone. – Toshio Hosokawa

On 3 December, the German premiere of Futari Shizuka will be presented at the Cologne Philharmonie. Hosokawa’s companion piece, the one-act opera The Raven, can be seen on 7 and 10 December at the Théâtre National in Luxembourg.

• Toshio Hosokawa - profile


• Futari Shizuka – concert information


• Futari Shizuka – workdetails