Letter from Hong Kong
Hong Kong likely doesn’t leap to mind as an opera destination, but if you time your visit right, you can enjoy the things the territory is famous for—the food, the photogenic oceanside vistas, the endlessly fascinating interplay of East and West—along with a vivid program of Chinese and Western opera. There’s been a push over the last few years to promote traditional Chinese theatre to local audiences and performances are frequent. Fully staged Western opera is rarer, though still on the classical music calendar every few months.
Last December, for example, Musica Viva staged Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (with Americans in the American roles and Asian artists in the Asian); in February, the Hong Kong Arts Festival (HKAF) presented Wagner’s Tannhäuser; and in May, Opera Hong Kong mounted Mozart’s Don Giovanni (with Canadian soprano Kathryn Whyte as Donna Anna). Over the same period, the biggest event for Chinese opera enthusiasts was the January opening and first-season launch of the Xiqu Centre, the newly built study and performing facility to promote Chinese traditional theatre (Xiqu) in all its forms.
The month-long directed by Robert Lepage. This year, Wagner’s was presented by Oper Leipzig in a surprisingly straightforward, staging by Spanish director Calixto Bieito. This was no second-string tour.
