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THE FLOATING BOX "Between them Jason Kao Hwang and Catherine Filloux have
addressed the problem of combining Chinese and Western styles with
astonishing success here. By placing their chamber opera The Floating
Box in New York’s Chinatown and having as its protagonist
Eva, the thoroughly American daughter of Chinese immigrants fascinated
by the discovery that her dead father was a leading musician in
China, they are not creating an artificial link between two very
disparate cultures but mirroring something which is very real.
Filloux recalls how she spent many hours recording oral histories
from Chinese immigrants before embarking on her libretto and how
a photograph in New York’s Museum of Chinese in the Americas
gave her the idea of having at the opera’s core a box, placed
on the family’s domestic altar, containing memorabilia of
the family’s
life in China." |
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"Selected
as one of ten "favorite full-length opera
recordings of the year" by Opera News,
December 2005. “Catherine Filloux’s libretto, based
on more than forty hours of oral histories she and Hwang recorded in
New York City’s Chinatown, is vivid and concisely poetic.” |
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