Toshio Hosokawa
composercontact
Adriana Kussmaul
ak(at)karstenwitt.com
+49 30 214 594-227
General Management
Dates
23.11. 20:00
Philharmonie Cologne
biography
I am searching for a new form of Japanese spiritual culture and music, one through which I can remain true to myself as well as to my origins. We need to examine the Western world again, more carefully, in order to see ourselves objectively and to truly get to know ourselves.”
Toshio Hosokawa, Japan’s pre-eminent living composer, creates his distinctive musical language from the fascinating relationship between Western avant-garde art and traditional Japanese culture. His music is strongly connected to the aesthetic and spiritual roots of the Japanese arts (such as calligraphy), as well as to those of Japanese court music (such as Gagaku). He gives musical expression to notions of beauty rooted in transience: “We hear the individual notes and appreciate, at the same time, the process of how the notes are born and die: a sound landscape of continual ‘becoming’ that is animated in itself.”
Born in Hiroshima in 1955, Toshio Hosokawa came to Germany in 1976, where he studied composition with Isang Yun, Brian Ferneyhough, and later Klaus Huber. Although his initial compositions drew inspiration from the Western avant-garde, he gradually built a new musical world between East and West. He first gained widespread recognition with the 2001 world premiere of his oratorio Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima.
In the last few years, Toshio Hosokawa has written numerous orchestral works, including Nach dem Sturm for two sopranos and orchestra, commissioned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and the Roche-commissioned Woven Dreams (Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst, Lucerne Festival). Circulating Ocean, which was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic in 2005 at the Salzburg Festival, has meanwhile become part of the standard repertoire of many orchestras. In 2013 Toshio Hosokawa returned to Salzburg with Klage for soprano and orchestra, based on a text by Georg Trakl (NHK Symphony Orchestra under Charles Dutoit, soprano: Anna Prohaska). A performance of the organ concerto Umarmung, which had its premiere in 2017 with Christian Schmitt and the Bamberg Symphony under Jakub Hrůša, was reprised the year following at the Vienna Konzerthaus with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Cornelius Meister.
After last season's premieres of his composition Regentanz for the Ensemble Percussion de Strasbourg and a song adaptation for the cellist Steven Isserlis and the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra, the 2019/20 season follows with two string quartets for the Arditti Quartet and the Premio Paolo Borciani competition. In addition to a piano variation for Rudolf Buchbinder and a work for the Berlin Philharmonic Octet, Toshio Hosokawa is creating a new composition for the ensemble Intercontemporain. Its premiere will take place in 2020 in San Francisco under the direction of Matthias Pintscher. In November 2019, the Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra debuts his new orchestral work UZU.
Many of Toshio Hosokawa’s earlier music theatre works have become part of the repertoire of major opera houses. His first opera Vision of Lear garnered critical acclaim at the Munich Biennale in 1998, and his 2004 work Hanjo, staged by the choreographer Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker and co-commissioned by Brussels’ La Monnaie and the Festival Aix-en-Provence, has been seen on numerous stages since its premiere. As with Hanjo, Matsukaze also draws on material from the Japanese noh theatre tradition. The opera was first performed in 2011 in a production by the choreographer Sasha Waltz at La Monnaie and subsequently in Berlin, Warsaw, and Luxembourg. Staged performances of the monodrama The Raven for mezzo-soprano and ensemble, which had its world premiere in Brussels in 2012, have also taken place. In recent years, Toshio Hosokawa has presented three additional operas in quick succession: Stilles Meer debuted in 2016 at the Hamburg Staatsoper, the one-act melodrama Futari Shizuka (The maiden from the sea) premiered in 2017 in Paris, with Erdbeben:Träume following in 2018 at the Oper Stuttgart, based on a libretto by the Büchner prizewinner Marcel Bayer.
Toshio Hosokawa continues to compose works that focus on nature themes, such as the horn concerto Moment of Blossoming for Stefan Dohr and the Berlin Philharmonic (2011). Since 2003 he has been composing a loose sequence entitled Voyages for solo instrument and ensemble. In some of these works he combines Japanese and European instruments, as in Voyages X Nozarashi for shakuhachi and ensemble. Traditional Japanese instruments such as the shō or koto also feature elsewhere in his oeuvre, which comprises some 130 compositions.
Toshio Hosokawa has received numerous awards and prizes. He has been a member of the Academy of Fine Arts Berlin since 2001 and was a fellow of Berlin’s Institute for Advanced Study in 2006/7 and 2008/9. In 2013/14 he was composer in residence at the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and in 2018 he received the Japan Foundation award. He is artistic director of both the Takefu International Music Festival and Suntory Hall International Program for Music Composition and, since July 2019, composer in residence for two years with the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra.
2019/2020 season
This biography is to be reproduced without any changes, omissions or additions, unless expressly authorised by the artist management.
Discography
Toshio Hosokawa - Orchestral Works, Vol. 3
Ilse Eerens, Susanne Elmark, Mihoko Fujimura, Tadashi Tajima, singers
Basque National Orchestra / Orquesta Sinfónica de Euskadi
Jun Märkl, conductor
Naxos, 2018, 8.573733
Momo Kodama: Point and Line - Debussy | Hosokawa
Momo Kodama, piano
ECM Records, 2017, ECM 2509
Toshio Hosokawa - Quintets & Solos
Arditti Quartet; Mayumi Miyata; Naoko Yoshino; Tosiya Suzuki
WERGO, 2014, WER 6769 2
Toshio Hosokawa - Silent Flowers
Arditti Quartet
WERGO, 2013, WER 6761 2
Magazine
Toshio Hosokawa: Erdbeben. Träume
On 1 July a world premiere at the Opera Stuttgart is hoping to be ground-breaking in the true sense of the world: Toshio Hosokawa’s Erdbeben. Träume (“Earthquake. Dreams”) is based on Heinrich von Kleist’s novella The Earthquake in Chile. Marcel Beyer, winner of the Kleist Prize in 2014 and Büchner Prize in 2016, transforms this parable about the instability of humanity in the face of threatening situations into a libretto in which the corruptibility of the masses also plays an important role. This inspired Toshio Hosokawa to create a leading role for the Staatsopernchor Stuttgart, nine-time winners of the “Opera Choir of the Year”. Intendant Jossi Wieler will bring Toshio Hosokawa’s work to the stage with director Sergio Morabito and stage design by Anna Viebrock, and with this production bids farewell to the city, as too does long-standing music director Sylvain Cambreling, who leads the premiere on the eve of his 70th birthday....
We must look at what has happened – Toshio Hosokawa’s ‘Stilles Meer’
Two years after its celebrated premiere, Toshio Hosokawa’s opera Stilles Meer is being revived at the Hamburg State Opera from 31 January, in the original production by Japanese director Oriza Hirata and the musical direction once again taken by Kent Nagano. The work was enthusiastically received by critics and audiences alike; NMZ magazine commented that “Hosakawa’s sounds are so finely tuned, they generate a real undertow,” whilst BR-Klassik praised “a tremendously subtle, tentative drama […] an intense interaction with moments of tension.” Stilles Meer deals with traditional subject matter from Noh theatre, brought up to date in the context of Fukushima. Toshio Hosokawa gave an interview about the opera and its relationship to the Fukushima catastrophe during a visit to Berlin at the end of 2015....
A drama of salvation: Toshio Hosokawa’s opera ‘Matsukaze’
The evening / is bitter / for those / whose lover is as far / as the sky.
(Japan, unknown poet, 920 AD)...
Vanishing notes: Toshio Hosokawa‘s speech at the MozartLabor
On 31 May, Toshio Hosokawa was invited by the Mozartfest Würzburg to give a speech during the MozartLabor (Mozart Laboratory), a three-day symposium for academics, composers, musicians and music lovers. While describing his specific perspective on Mozart’s music, he took the opportunity to reflect on his own cultural and musical background, and on how Western and Japanese art deals with sorrow and mortality....
Beauty is a weapon: The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan
It is always a sensation for the dance world when the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan brings one of their productions to Germany. The great dance critic Jochen Schmidt described the company’s performance of the trilogy Cursive in the Berliner Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2006 as, "Currently the most relevant dance piece in the world," and Pina Bausch warmly welcomed the ensemble in 2008 to her NRW International Dance Festival with great enthusiasm. The productions that have been performed in Germany over the last two decades are without exception electrifying and have received high praise from audiences and critics alike....
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