Kazuko Hara : Taki Rentaro (Tokyo premiere), 8th April 2000

 

Nihon Opera Kyokai

 

Bunkyo Civic Hall, Tokyo

 

Cast: Hiroshi Mochiki / Kazuhiko Ichikawa (Rentaro), Eriko Sekine / Tomoko Akimoto (Nami), Naoko Sunaga / Yuko Kinoshita (Rentaro's mother), Mayumi Fujita / Shinobu Futami (Yuki Koda), Kazuko Koga / Aya Yamaguchi (En Koda), Makoto Fujisawa / Yasushi Nakamura (Bansui Doi), Yasushi Nakamura / Makoto Fujisawa (Rohan Koda), Izumi Furusawa / Ikuo Oho (Toson Shimazaki) (First cast 7 April 2000/ second cast 8 April 2000).

 

The Japan Shinsei Symphony Orchestra, the Nihon Opera Kyokai Chorus and the Tama Family Singers, Yutaka Hoshide (conductor), Shigetaka Matsumoto (stage director)

 

The opera Taki Rentaro, performed at the Bunkyo Civic Hall in Tokyo on the weekend of April 7-8 2000, was first performed in 1998 at the Oita Prefectural Cultural Centre. Kazuko Hara (composer of 17 operas to date) was commissioned by the Oita Prefectural Opera Society to write an opera based on the life of the Japanese composer Rentaro Taki (his name in western style), who lived from 1879 to 1903.

 

Taki lived at a time when Japanese culture was becoming more and more westernized, and this is reflected in his music. During his tragically short life he travelled to Germany where he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory for two months before becoming ill and being forced to returned to Japan where he died two years later. He composed mainly songs and piano pieces. His most famous work is the song 'Kojo no Tsuki' ( 'Moon at a Desolate Castle').

 

A large screen greeted the audience as they entered the theatre with what looked like an old faded green photograph out of an album. This set the mood for both the music and the biographical opera, which had a quaint other-worldliness to it. As well as the screen, sound effects on tape, of cicadas and trams etc., were also used to conjure up the past. These effects were very subtly blended to give the sense of eavesdropping on a forever vanished world.

 

This feeling of this other-worldliness was also created by the children's chorus, complete with ragged costumes and homemade fishing lines. Singing a capella folk-like melodies they periodically trooped around the stage, almost as punctuation to the storyline, and as a refreshing contrast to the operatic singing and mostly light romantic orchestration (though a shakuhachi was also used for effect).

 

Composing a biographical opera is, to say the least, problematic. Kazuko Hara, who wrote her own libretto, had to select music from Taki's original work and then compose her own music around them - not an easy task. The selected pieces, including the famous song 'Kojo no Tsuki' ('Moon at a Desolate Castle') and the solo piano piece Urami (Regret), were all somewhat coyly romantic. Taki's music has a tendency towards minor modal harmonies with hints of the orient, and Hara's own music for the opera was also tonal and very effective, if at times not very imaginative. The throbbing dotted rhythms and tremulando strings in Taki's death scene were, for instance, a bit obvious. There were hints of modernism, such as when a xylophone suddenly broke through the orchestral texture suggesting Taki's frustration with his illness, but these were too infrequent to become a feature.

 

Overall though there was a good balance between the stage setting, the music and the realistic sound effects. The sense of time passing and Taki's travels were very carefully contrived. In Act 2 the reassuring train sounds, the lonesome sounds of the sea, and the map of the world (in friendly blue up on the screen), combined with the very skilful displacement of the character of Taki by the use of lighting effects, were cinematic and entertaining. In the scene where the pianist Nobu Koda and novelist Rohan Koda visit Taki in a German hospital, the distant church bells, the sound of the (taped) organ with the off-stage singing gave a sense of inevitability to what was happening on stage.

 

The singing throughout the opera was well-managed and balanced although I felt there was too much vibrato from the female voices. The composer's use of sprechtstimme worked perfectly in Japanese and the singers seemed very natural in their delivery. There were good voices too in the small, but very effective, adult chorus particularly when they sang off-stage. However it was the children's chorus with its realistic, slightly forced tone, which added the most atmosphere, and was possibly the most Japanese element of the whole opera, notwithstanding the shakuhachi. In the end it was an enjoyable experience, theatrically very entertaining, and a beautiful introduction to the music of Rentaro Taki for those unfamiliar with his work.

 

© Paul Hayes, 16 June 2000

 

glossary:

 

shakuhachi reed instrument made of bamboo, sometimes referred to as a fipple flute, noted for its plangency

sprechtstimme literally speech song