Hong Kong as a Rising Stage for New Opera

Great operas are born in Milan. In Paris. In New York. This one dares to be born somewhere else entirely.
Beauty and Sadness, a world premiere drawn from Yasunari Kawabata’s final novel, opens not in a gilded European house but in Hong Kong — a city with no opera house at all. That absence could have been a barrier. Instead, it became a beginning.
Building From Nothing
Carolyn Choa had no stage waiting for her, no resident orchestra, no standing company. So she built them all.
The orchestra was assembled from scratch. The cast gathered voice by voice. The crew shaped piece by piece. Every element of this production had to be summoned into being, and none of it would have happened without producer Vina Chang, whose tireless work turned an ambitious dream into a living thing.
There is something bracing about starting with an empty page. When nothing is inherited, everything becomes a choice.
A Homecoming
Choa is a Hong Kong girl, born and raised, and her pride in the city runs deep. She has watched its talent bloom across the arts, her own sisters among those shaping the next generation at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.
She calls Hong Kong perfectly placed. Cosmopolitan by nature. Open-hearted by instinct. A city brimming with musicians, dancers, and crew who work with rare commitment and focus.
For this premiere, she drew talent from across the world — collaborators from Russia, Hungary, England, and China, singers from Korea and Beijing, all woven together with the abundant artistry of Hong Kong itself.
Why Here, and Not Elsewhere
The choice was more than sentiment. It was practical, even inspired.
Beauty and Sadness is a chamber work, roughly ninety minutes long, carried by an orchestra of just twenty-three in the pit. Large European and American houses rarely embrace such intimate pieces. Yet the production still needs real space for its set — simple, low-tech, but never small.
That delicate balance found its perfect home in the Lyric Theatre at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. A professional stage, seasoned in everything from Western opera to Chinese drama and dance. A room that has, as Choa says, seen it all.
There was another gift in staying home. Because the scale was intimate, she could cast for the eye as well as the ear — choosing performers who truly looked their parts, a rare luxury in an art form that usually bows to the voice first.
An Audience Ready to Listen
Hong Kong adores Japanese culture. Its people travel north in torrents, drawn to the food, the sights, the quiet beauty of it all — and many read Kawabata with a feeling that Western audiences may never quite reach.
Where others might scratch their heads at his mysteries, this city meets them with recognition.
Choa admits to nerves. Five nights. A large theatre. A story that resists easy answers.
But her hope stretches far beyond opening night. She dreams of a future where artists everywhere look to Hong Kong — not as a distant outpost, but as a place where new work is born.