Rei Hotoda has ended a five-year journey.

Rei Hotoda - Apparitions CD Launch

It was in 2003, well before she took up her post as assistant conductor with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, that she got the idea to explore her Asian roots through two of her great passions — piano playing and contemporary music.
The result is her first CD, Apparitions, which collects nine previously unrecorded piano compositions by modern Asian composers. It will be launched 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Alexus art studio, 45-166 Meadowood Dr. in St. Vital. The CD is available at McNally Robinson Booksellers.
Hotoda, a Japanese-American who grew up in Chicago, recorded the CD in Winnipeg on her Steinway B seven-foot grand piano and had it produced by Signpost Music, the company operated by Christian singer-songwriter Steve Bell.
She financed the avant-garde project with donations from several WSO board members and a grant from Manitoba Film and Sound.
Featuring three Canadian compositions, including one by the WSO’s composer-in-residence, Vincent Ho, Apparitions is at the other end of the musical spectrum from, say, Britney Spears’ Circus.
“To truly engage musical art, the listener and the performer must become active co-participants,” she says in the album’s liner notes.

“If you open yourself to this music, it may in turn open you to contemplation, questions and dark reveries.”

Hotoda earned a PhD in piano performance before studying to become a conductor. She is hoping the CD will receive U.S. distribution by the summer when she takes up her new post as assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

“I’m very excited about it,” says Hotoda, who will end her three-year WSO term in May. “It certainly makes the rest of my time here less stressful, knowing I have somewhere to go.”

The 100-member DSO, under its new Dutch music director, Jaap van Zweden, formally announced Hotoda’s appointment in October following her successful audition the month prior.
Hotoda, a protégé of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop, is also hoping that her new job in heart of Texas will have spinoff benefits for her pops-concert collaboration with Bell.
Since WSO music director Alexander Mickelthwate assigned her to conduct Bell’s orchestral debut in 2006, the pair have turned the gig into a growing sideline.
They’ve also become friends. She has travelled with him to conduct his appearances with several other Canadian orchestras. And, of course, she was on the podium for this past weekend’s sold-out engagement with the 67-member WSO.

“He’s reaching a part of the audience that is needing more than entertainment from their evening out,” Hotoda says.

Hotoda and Bell have even produced a CD together, Symphony Sessions, which won a Western Canadian Music Award.

“Mike Janzen’s scores are very much more classically oriented than most pops arrangements,” Hotoda says. “They’re more complex and it makes it more musically interesting for me to conduct.”

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca