On 22 May, Toshio Hosokawa’s one act opera, Hanjo, will open in a production by Florentine Klepper with the Berner Symphonieorchester and Kevin John Edusei at the Concert Theatre Bern. The work was commissioned for the festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2004 and has since been staged in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Japan.
Hanjo centres around the love story between a geisha girl Hanako and a young man called Yoshio who, forced to part with each other, exchange fans as a symbol that they would one day be together again. After Yoshio leaves, Hanako is bought by Jitsuko, a spinster. Hanako waits every day at the train station in hope that Yoshio might come to find her but as the newspapers begin to gossip about her strange behaviour, Jitsuko begins to worry that Yoshio will come to take her away. One day, Yoshio arrives at Jitsuko’s house with a fan but Hanako says the man before her is not Yoshio. Does she not recognise him? Or is she afraid to leave her life of endless waiting?
“Between dream and reality”
Hosokawa describes his opera as something between dream and reality: a development out of traditional Japanese Noh theatre in which ideas of fantasy and reality are explored.
“I wanted to illustrate with the music a drama that explores the boundaries between dream and reality, between insanity and reason. Sometimes that which exists only in the universe of dreams can be expressed more intensely through music than in theatre alone. I wanted to show the point of view of someone who sways between dream and reality. In the background the atmosphere in the orchestra changes gradually, like a picture on silk that one rolls out. The silence is woven slowly, but competently in the pattern of that silk roll, like a white dot in the middle of the picture.” – Hosokawa
Hanjo will run from 22 May to 5 June in Bern. On 14 June, Ensemble Resonanz will give the world premiere of Sorrow River for recorder and strings alongside Voyage VII for trumpet and strings at the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg.
