Teiya Kasahara gave the first iteration of a self-exploratory monologue from Amplified Opera tonight at the Toronto Summer Music Festival in Walter Hall. It’s called The Butterfly Project because it’s to be an ongoing investigation, inviting us to explore the origins of the Japanese music appropriated by the European Puccini for his teenaged heroine in the popular opera. Kasahara draws on their experience as a Nikkei (of Japanese descent) Canadian settler to consider (as they say in the program note) what ChoCho-san “might have been thinking , doing, dreaming of during those three years of her life from geisha to bride, wife to woman to mother”.
While Kasahara previously brought a happy and exuberant disruptive energy to their deconstructive exploration of the Queen of the Night, in The Queen in Me, another project with multiple iterations, on this occasion the subject matter calls for a more solemn and reflective approach.
It’s personal.
There’s surely some ambivalence underlying Kasahara’s brilliant new work performed with Andrea Wong, consisting of electronics, live sound design, voice, piano and violin. They’ve sung the Puccini and likely loved the music employed in this problematic opera even as we were invited to understand the work anew.
Tonight it was as though Butterfly escaped her usual fate, the role she’s been trapped in by the opera and previous versions of the story by David Belasco or John Luther Long. We heard a new libretto from Eiki Isomura and Josh Shaw, the role sung in Japanese where we’ve previously usually heard Italian. We heard some of the great aria, some familiar melodies, interrupting the usual expectations and pushing us to feel something different. At times Kasahara was seemingly singing with a full orchestra, a remarkable effect.
This was apt for a concert hall, where the emphasis was on music rather than the drama. We were offered tangents, possible pathways left open rather than closed by the death that usually ends Puccini’s opera.
There’s a bit of an irony to mention. The TSM logo shows a Butterfly perched on a violin, mentioning the Festival theme of “metamorphosis”.
Yet the butterfly image of the original opera is much darker, not a metaphor of transformation, but one of conquest given that Butterfly sings fearfully (in the Act I duet of Puccini’s opera) that westerners usually mount butterflies on pins (a fact Pinkerton seems to embrace as romantic, ignoring her fears), a horrible foreshadowing of her eventual fate. In Kasahara’s project Butterfly escapes that horror for one night, as indeed there is the prospect of metamorphosis in their reinvention of the work.
In the first half we listened to music of Japanese composers that was completely new to me, piano, violin & vocal music, by Rentaro Taki, Kunihiko Hashimoto, Kosaku Yamada, and Koichi Kishi, performed by Kasahara, Dabin Zoey Yang, Xi Huang and Gregory Smith.
It was appropriately disorienting, considering that in Puccini’s opera we encounter the appropriated melodies without any attribution, subsumed into his orchestral score as a western composition. Kasahara was in a sense refreshing our perspective by reorienting us towards Japan and its culture.
I have a lot to learn.
