Ear Supply: Under the Plum Blossom

POC Photo

One of the butterfly's avatars.

Details

Chapel Performance Space, 4649 Sunnyside Ave., 800-838-3006, fisherensemble.org. $13–$15. 8 p.m. Fri., April 9–Sat., April 10.

Related Content

• Opening Nights: At the Hawk’s Well
  March 3, 2010
• Tell Me About That Album: Young & Old by Tennis
  December 8, 2011
• Microsoft Kills the Zune
  March 15, 2011
• American Handel Festival
  March 2, 2011
• The Weekly Wire: The Week's Recommended Events
  March 9, 2011

More About

• Christy Fisher
• Byron Schenkman
• William Butler Yeats
• Steve Smith
• Garrett Fisher

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Three artists, in a way, share the title role in Kocho, the latest dreamy, poetic, subtly perfumed dance/opera by Garrett Fisher. His sister/frequent collaborator Christy Fisher (pictured) portrays a butterfly, as does one of the cast of five singers and, metaphorically, the flutist in the four-instrument orchestra (the other three: an array of gongs, a six-string bass, and Fisher himself on harmonium). Fisher took his text, sung in Japanese, from a 15th-century Noh drama; it enfolds a central interlude of new poetry in modern English by Amy Schrader. Meditative, ritualistic, and always eschewing traditional operatic melodrama for gentle, even inscrutable, lyricism, Fisher's operas have gained a following on both coasts; in September he'll take Kocho to New York, where Times critic Steve Smith called last year's Yeats-based At the Hawk's Well a "strikingly individual utterance of unambiguous beauty." To open this evening, pianist Byron Schenkman will play Fisher's Piano Raga no. 1, a piece which combines Fisher's interest in Indian-style improvisational structures and Schenkman's vivid way with the rhapsodic freedom of 16th-century keyboard music, the repertory he's more usually associated with.