Ryoko Aoki holds a unique position in the field of Noh theatre as a female singer and performer. She has performed in several traditional Noh plays, historically the reserve of male actors. Above all, she is the pioneer of and inspiration for a new artistic form combining utai – traditional Noh recitation – with contemporary music. Nearly 60 works have been written for her by various composers including Peter Eötvös, Toshio Hosokawa, Malika Kishino, Stefano Gervasoni, José María Sánchez-Verdú, and Oliver Schneller.

She has performed with ensembles and orchestras including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Spanish National Orchestra and Choir (OCNE), the Ensemble intercontemporain, the Ensemble Musikfabrik, the Remix Ensemble, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Arditti Quartet, the Quatour Diotima, and the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra.

In June 2027, she will give the Austrian premiere of Fabián Panisello’s composition Change for Noh voice, baritone, electronics and chamber ensemble in Salzburg, together with the OENM ensemble under the baton of Johannes Kalitzke. The German premiere of the work – which she premiered in Cuenca in 2026 with the PluralEnsemble under the composer’s baton – will follow in July 2027 at the Kontakte Festival for electroacoustic music and sound art at the Berlin Academy of Arts.

In 2013, Ryoko Aoki made her debut at the Teatro Real de Madrid in Wolfgang Rihm’s opera The Conquest of Mexico in the role of Malinche, in a production directed by Pierre Audi. The world premiere of Noriko Baba's "Nopera" AOI with the Ensemble 2e2m in Paris in 2016 was followed by world premieres of two works composed for her in the 2017/18 season: Federico Gardella’s Two Souls at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Toshio Hosokawa’s Futari Shizuka (The Maiden from the Sea) with the Ensemble intercontemporain at the Philharmonie de Paris and Kölner Philharmonie. The work was then performed at the University of Toronto, the TTIMF Festival in Tongyeong/Korea, the Talea Ensemble in New York and the Suntory Hall Summer Festival 2021 with the Ensemble intercontemporain. In 2019, she performed Peter Eötvös' Secret kiss, premiered by the Gageego Ensemble, at Konserthus Göteborg, followed by performances at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, Casa da Música Porto with Remix Ensemble and Auditorio Nacional Madrid with Plural Ensemble as well as with the Ensemble Musikfabrik at the Berlin Philharmonie and in Cologne and Budapest. Furthermore, in 2022 she premiered José María Sánchez-Verdú’s Hazia la Luz with the Spanish National Orchestra and Choir (OCNE) at the Auditorio Nacional Madrid. 

In 2024, Ryoko Aoki appeared at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande, in a production directed by Pierre Audi. During the 2025/26 season, Misato Mochizuki’s music theatre piece Otemba, composed especially for Ryoko Aoki, premiered at the Holland Festival, followed by a number of revivals in the Netherlands. The music theatre piece Secret Flowers – Contemporary Variations on Nō Theatre, for a Noh performer, an actress, a string quartet and percussion, with music by Toshio Hosokawa, Noriko Baba and a new composition by Juha T. Koskinen, had its world premiere in April 2026 at the Tampere Biennale, directed by Aleksi Barrière.

As part of her NohxContemporary Music project, Ryoko Aoki has commissioned a series of new works for Noh voice. A recording of some of these compositions, including Peter Eötvös' Harakiri, was released in 2014. During Covid-19 pandemic, she broadcasted the online concert HO NOH – Pray for an end to the Covid-19 as a live-streaming remote session on her YouTube Channel. In 2021, she released the recording Yoru no Kotoba with the cellist of Ensemble intercontemporain, Éric-Maria Couturier, which was created in a real-time remote recording session between Tokyo and Paris. In 2025, a CD of Toshio Hosokawa’s Futari Shizuka, recorded with the Residentie Orkest The Hague conducted by Jun Märkl, was released by Naxos.

Ryoko Aoki obtained a BA and a Master of Music from the Faculty of Music at the Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music with a focus on the Kanze school of Noh theatre, before gaining a Ph.D. from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, with a thesis on "Women and Noh". She was appointed "Japan Cultural Envoy" by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japanese government in 2015 and was awarded “The Creative Tradition Prize” by the Japan Arts Foundation in 2019.

2026/27 season

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A list of all works by Ryoko Aoki can be found here.

In this short chamber opera, which is inspired by the traditional Noh play Futari Shizuka (The Two Shizukas), Toshio Hosokawa's music tells the unique story of the encounter of an ancient Japanese ghost with a present-day refugee.
The libretto, written by Oriza Hirata is sung both in English and Japanese: a migrant woman, Helen (soprano), is lost on a beach shore where she meets another woman, who has been lost in the snow for nine centuries: The Ghost of Lady Shizuka. They share a tragic fate, caused by men’s wars, but their encounter might change their paths.