Streaming: OperaVision
Available: from 12 December 2025 at 19:00 CET (GMT+1) to 12 June 2026 at 12:00 CET (GMT+1)
Recorded: 17 August 2025
Sung in: Japanese, German, Ukrainian
Subtitles: English, Japanese
Venue: New National Theatre Tokyo
Artists
Natasha: Ilse Eerens
Arato: Hiroka Yamashita
Mephistos Enkel: Christian Miedl
Frau A: Mari Moriya
Frau B: Akiko Tomihira
Businessman A: Jun Bo Tang
Saxophone: Masanori Oishi
Electric Guitar: Gaku Yamada
Orchestra: Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra
Chorus: New National Theatre Chorus
Conductor: Kazushi Ono
Director: Christian Räth
Music: Toshio Hosokawa
Text: Yōko Tawada
Sets: Christian Räth, Daniel Unger
Costumes: Mattie Ullrich
Lights: Rick Fisher
Video: Clemens Walter
Choreography: Catherine Galasso
Electronic sound design: Sumihisa Arima
Chorus master: Kyohei Tomihira
A descent into today’s infernos
Moaning of the sea and the universe. Arato, who yearns for Mother Nature as his source of life, meets a woman, Natasha, who has left her homeland. Although they do not speak the same language, they manage to share their names. Suddenly, a strange figure appears, introducing himself as the grandson of Mephistopheles, guiding Arato and Natasha through the many hells of our time.
After its world premiere in Tokyo last August, Natasha, the new opera by Toshio Hosokawa, is now available for free on OperaVision. Commissioned by the New National Theatre Tokyo and its Artistic Director Kazushi Ono, the work examines loss, displacement, and the fragile threads of communication that connect people shaped by trauma.
The multilingual libretto by Yōko Tawada blends Japanese, Ukrainian, German, English, French and Chinese, reflecting a world where language fails but human recognition persists. As Natasha (Ilse Eerens) and Arato (Hiroka Yamashita) travel through a series of contemporary underworlds — a ruined forest, a sea suffocated by plastic, the “business hell” of a towering financial centre — the opera draws unsettling parallels with the environmental and social crises of today.
Hosokawa’s score, atmospheric and incisive, finds its counterpart in Christian Räth’s staging and Clemens Walter’s video design, which together create a stark, almost tactile vision of collapse. Under Kazushi Ono, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra and the New National Theatre Chorus shape a sound world that reinforces the opera’s themes of fragility, destruction and the possibility of empathy.
Natasha stands among Hosokawa’s most ambitious stage works — a contemporary inferno that feels uncomfortably close to the world we inhabit.
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