O Hototogisu!

Description

This exquisite ‘fragment of a Japonisme’ premiered in 2017 and conceived as a kind of double concerto for soprano,flute and ensemble of 23 players proved to be Oliver Knussen’s final work. The 8-minute piece couches seven exquisite haiku settings in richly evocative music which incorporates signals from Japanese theatre (particularly Kabuki). It concerns the Hototogisu (or Lesser Cuckoo),a bird widely invoked in Japanese haiku poetry of the 17th-19th centuries, where the poet listens for its arrival from the mountains both as a harbinger of summer and a voice from the land of the dead. O Hototogisu! is presented here as a typeset score with two facsimile pages fromthe composer’s manuscript.