Operas in Concert: East Asian Love Stories
Bright Sheng/David Henry Hwang and Bright Sheng
Dream of the Red Chamber is an epic Qing Dynasty novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the Jia family. In their Puccini-esque adaptation for the lyric theater, Sheng and Hwang focus on a moving central love triangle between a young man named Bao Yu, his beautiful cousin Dai Yu, and the wife his mother intends for him (another beautiful cousin named Bao Chai). The opera’s “exquisite, soaring vocal writing reveals Sheng as a melodist of uncommon distinction” (Financial Times), as “Chinese folk tunes get transformed into rapturously expressive new music, gorgeously colored” (Los Angeles Times).
Dream of the Red Chamber is available in full and reduced orchestrations.
Soloists: Meigui Zhang (Dai Yu), Hyona Kim (Lady Wang), Konu Kim (Bao Yu), Hongni Wu (Bao Chai)
trailer, San Francisco Opera
© Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg
Tan Dun/Tan Dun and Xu Ying
Based on Chinese and Japanese history, Tea: A Mirror of Soul sketches the tale of Seikyo, a prince who has become a monk. Tan Dun sets this “loose-leaf narrative” with an “ever-extending palette” (Opera News) of “tantalizing and provocative” music (Broad Street Review). Incorporating large sheets of paper and bowls of water manipulated by players, Tea is a multisensorial feast that evokes the long tradition of ritualistic tea brewing and drinking. Its staging has tended towards the minimalistic, making for a ready adaptation to the concert hall.
Soloists: Chen-ye Yuan (Seikyo), Nancy Allen Lundy (Lan), Roger Honeywell (Prince), Kirk Eichelberger (Emperor), Ning Liang (Lu)
excerpts, Symphony Orchestra of the University Mozarteum Salzburg
Art’s Afterlives | Feminist Essays | Casting Off Chains: Abolition and the Civil War | The Americas: Latine Culture and History | East Asian Love Stories | Positively Medieval: Stories of the Middle Ages and Renaissance | Classics of English Fiction | The 19th Century: Great Wars and Colonial Sorrows | Upheavals of the 20th Century | The Weight of Motherhood