The Times, July 8th 2014

★★★★☆

The real hotspot of the Cheltenham Festival has become the intimate space of the Parabola Arts Centre: this year so far it has attracted..
and, best of all, Nicola LeFanu’s new music-theatre piece Tokaido Road.

Inspired by the Japanese artist Hiroshige’s woodblock print series 53 Stations of the Tokaido, LeFanu and her librettist Nancy Gaffield have created an existential journey in speech, song, mime and dance with Hiroshige’s pictures projected. What with unhappy love, treacherous rivers and wintry scenes, it’s rather like an oriental Winterreise. We’re left with Hiroshige in old age, singing his own epitaph, and the dying murmurs of the sho (Japanese mouth organ) and flickerings of the plucked koto.

The strongest element in Tokaido Road is LeFanu’s sensitive use of the combined western and Japanese sound palette of the Okeanos ensemble, which combines the likes of sho and koto with oboe, clarinet, viola and cello.

The piece is well paced and meticulously thought through, with spare instrumental lines exquisitely woven with the voices and deftly conducted by Dominic Wheeler. The director Caroline Clegg and choreographer Nando Messias guide the body language of the old Hiroshige (baritone Jeremy Huw Williams, speaking) and the young, travelling Hiroshige (Williams, singing), the two lovers Kikuyo (Raphaela Papadakis) and Mariko (Caryl Hughes), and Tomoko Komura’s superb mime artistry. Every word is audible, every movement is eloquent and Kimie Nakano’s design remains long in the mind’s eye.

Hilary Finch

LeFanu has been awarded the Elgar Bursary, which supports a major commission for the BBCSO. Read more on this link:

http://royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/index.php/rps_today/news/nicola_lefanu_awarded_the_elgar_bursary_2014

The premiere of Tokaido Road at Cheltenham on July 6th will be followed by a performance on August 6th at  Lake District Summer Music.

http://www.ldsm.org.uk/international-festival/2014-08-06-tokaido-road
http://www.ldsm.org.uk/international-festival/2014-08-06-pre-performance-talk

Okeanos announces

Tokaido Road
A Journey after Hiroshige

Music - Nicola LeFanu
Libretto - Nancy Gaffield
Conductor - Dominic Wheeler
Director – Caroline Clegg
Okeanos

World premiere at the Cheltenham Music Festival 6/7/2014

Okeanos, the UK’s unique Western-Japanese music ensemble, announces a new multi-media chamber music opera, Tokaido Road, to tour National Festivals from July 2014. This 50 minute work, composed by Nicola LeFanu with a libretto by Nancy Gaffield, is a composite of music, poetry, mime, dance and visual imagery.

In 1832 the young artist Hiroshige set out on Japan’s great Eastern sea-coast road: Tokaido Road, linking Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. His paintings from the journey, the famous woodblock prints ‘Fifty Three Stations of the Tokaido’, made his fortune. Till then, prints depicted geisha or actors; now, the secrets of a hidden country were revealed.

In the opera, we meet young Hiro discovering the landscape in all its perilous beauty. Through projected images, mime and sung poetry, we travel with him. The journey was dangerous: as well as contending with natural disasters - earthquake, flood – travellers had to scale cliffs and ford rivers. To constrain travel, the military government had forbidden bridge-building.

Hiro savours all his adventures – not least the amorous ones – and his paintings bring to life everyone he met: old men and beautiful women, samurai and geisha, pilgrims, porters and passers-by.

Hiroshige in old age is present in the opera too, reflecting on what had gripped his imagination twenty-five years earlier. Behind every welcoming inn and tea-house (‘station’) on the Tokaido, there was another story: persecution, dispossession, famine. Hiroshige braved the government censor by publishing prints that show the horror of death through starvation. His work reminds us of the power of art to bear witness.

Tokaido Road will premiere at the Cheltenham Music Festival on 6th July 2014. Following the premiere, Tokaido Road will tour to seven other high profile UK venues and undertake an outreach project in Kent, coordinated by award-winning ‘Workers of Art.’

Travel, discovery, art…we can all relate to these timeless themes. In Tokaido Road, Okeanos will show how powerfully Hiroshige’s art can still resonate today. As we follow his journey, like travellers on the Tokaido, we meander between centuries.

Notes for Editors

Tokaido Road – A Journey after Hiroshige

Okeanos formed in 2000 and is known for its unusual mix of Western and Japanese instruments. It has premiered over 100 new works and been featured on BBC Radio 3, Classic FM and Resonance FM, as well as performing extensively in high profile UK venues.

Nicola LeFanu (music) has composed over 100 works, which have been played and broadcast all over the world; her music is published by Novello and by Peters Edition and recorded by NMC, Naxos, Metier, Lorelt and NEOS. This will be her second collaboration with Okeanos.

Nancy Gaffield (libretto) is an award-winning poet and senior lecturer in creative writing at University of Kent. Her collection Tokaido Road was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was nominated for the Forward First Collection Prize and won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2011.

Performance dates
Cheltenham Festival (WP) 6th July 2014
Lake District Summer Music 6th August 2014
Six further performances in 2015.

Music
Robin Thompson Sho
Melissa Holding Koto
Jinny Shaw Oboe
Kate Romano Clarinets
Bridget Carey Viola
Sophie Harris Cello
Dominic Wheeler Conductor

Stage
Caroline Clegg Director
Kimie Nakano Designer
Daniel Whewell Lighting
Theo Burt Images
Wynn White Images
Stuart Calder Producer

Hiroshige images supplied by the British Museum

The commission and the production are supported by funding from Arts Council England, JTI, Britten Pears Foundation, Stanley Thomas Foundation, The Leche Trust, John S Cohen Foundation, The Radcliffe Trust, The Sasakawa Foundation.

Okeanos are grateful for corporate support towards development costs from JTI

Here is a youtube link http://youtu.be/hiOHnCH_vko to Windblown Seeds, which had a fine performance by the Arcos String Orchestra (director John-Edward Kelly) in Berlin on June 6th 2012, in the Konzerthaus.

Five LeFanu works will be performed on Wednesday January 8th 2014 in the PLG 'Young Artists' series at the Purcell Room, at London's Southbank Centre. At 6.15 the Jacquin trio perform 'Sea Sketches' for clarinet and piano, 'Chiaroscuro' for solo piano and 'Pleiades', the solo viola movement from 'Night Songs'. At 7.45, the Artesian quartet play String Quartet no 3, and the Two French Songs are performed by Joanna Skillett and Melanie Jones.

LeFanu is PLG's 'frontline' composer, with the programme including Christian Mason ('composer's choice') and Janacek ('linked composer').

Eight Studies for solo piano is performed by its dedicatee, Matthew Schellhorn, on Saturday 14th December. The recital is at 4.30 at Goldsmiths College; room 167, Richard Hoggart building. This is the premiere of the complete set.

'But Stars Remaining' is performed by Gina Fergione on Sunday November 3rd at the Stoke Newington Festival of Contemporary Music.

String Quartet no3 is performed by the Artesian String Quartet on Wednesday November 27th, 1.10pm at St James's Piccadilly.