Voice professor to perform lead role in Japanese opera

Tenor Brian Arreola will perform the lead tenor role of Yoshizo in the Japanese opera “Hebionna” (Snake Woman) by Asako Hirabayashi. The opera will have its world premiere June 27 in a production in Rowe Recital Hall and will be filmed for future distribution. The performance is the latest project in Arreola’s ongoing creative research of music by Asian and Asian-American composers.

“Asako Hirabayashi and I have been collaborating on opera and art song projects for nearly a decade,” said Arreola, a professor of voice in the College of Arts + Architecture. “In 2014 she invited me to participate in workshop performances of her first opera, “Yukionna,” with Nautilus Music Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Then, in 2017, I commissioned her to create an art song setting of the Japanese folk tale ‘The Boy Who Drew Cats,’ which became the title track of my Albany Records CD of art songs by Asian and Asian-American composers. And now, we are creating a film of her newest opera, ‘Hebionna.’”

Hirabayashi is a Japanese composer and harpsichordist based in Minneapolis. She has won numerous composition grants and awards, including a 2016 McKnight Fellowship for Composers and several first prizes in the Alienor International Harpsichord Composition Competition.

According to Arreola, the opera is “a fascinating mashup of Japanese folklore/mythology and modern-day eco-disaster cautionary tales.” Sung in Japanese it tells of a snake who is saved from a trap by a poor woodcutter. The snake becomes a beautiful young woman, and they fall in love and raise a child together.