_{Artist of the Week} 20 Qs for Njo Kong Kie

When was your first singing lesson (and with whom)?
I’m a composer, but I’ve sung in and played for choirs, so my early singing knowledge would have come from those experiences, as well as from accompanying students in their vocal lessons. I’ve also participated in group voice workshops, notably with Richard Armstrong at the Banff Centre. My first formal one-on-one singing lesson, however, was with Stacie Dunlop, who specializes in contemporary repertoire and is now also a Roy Hart Theatre Centre-certified teacher.

In 2019, I was creating I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron for the Canadian Stage season – a song cycle set to the poetry of contemporary Chinese worker-poet Xu Lizhi. As the work took shape, it became clear that it needed to be a solo show rather than the more conventional singer-plus-pianist format. I had known Stacie for years (I first accompanied her at an audition for the Banff Centre), so I trained with her to explore what my voice could – and wanted to – do within the context of the piece.

What is your comfort food?
If I’m making it myself, it’s a bowl of instant ramen, topped with whatever I can find in the fridge – or fried eggs over rice, drizzled with sweet soy sauce. If I’m ordering at a restaurant, it’s a bowl of rice congee with preserved eggs, accompanied by fried dough sticks, or spaghetti aglio e olio. When it comes to sweets, Tiramisu. 

Top 3 favourite composers ?
Bach. A pretty mundance answer, I know, but Bach gave us so much.

Shostakovich. I’ve always been drawn to his work, but a circus production set to his string quartets by the Australian circus company CIRCA truly deepened my relationship with this music. The production OPUS – featuring the Debussy Quartet alongside the company’s acrobats – made me feel as though I was experiencing both the music and the circus for the very first time. I went back three times during the run. The only other time I’ve done that was with Mamma Mia! when it first opened in Toronto. What can I say? Each fulfills a different need. I grew up with all the ABBA hits, and dancing with my late mom to those songs is a memory I’ll always cherish.

Jacques Brel and his arrangers and musicians. Beyond Brel’s artistry of songwriting and his unforgettable delivery, the band arrangements of his songs are phenomenal. They’re inseparable from the force of the work.

Heels or flats?
Flats. I’ve only worn heels once: for a Halloween walkabout on Church Street in Toronto, in a tutu with a veil and a sash that read Miss Taken, just to complete the ridiculous picture. Even then, the heels were pretty blocky – some might argue the shoes were basically flats.

Top 3 favourite operas
The esteemed readers will, I hope, forgive my transgression when I say that I can’t think of one – let alone three – operas that I love unreservedly from top to bottom. There are always moments when my attention drifts (blame it on the short attention span of a digital-age urban dweller), or passages that make me feel uneasy, or simply feel dated. So if I were to talk about “favourites,” there’d always be an asterisk attached.

That said, there are many, many fantastic moments that touch me deeply.

Act One of La bohème, from “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì” through “Che gelida manina” to “O soave fanciulla.” It doesn’t matter which production I’m watching or whether I’m simply listening to the audio – this sequence never fails to stir emotion, and in the best possible way. The scene with Benoît, though? Not my favourite. 

A friend quips, “If only one could fast-forward the boring bits of an opera.” If only we could all agree on what those moments are. Haha.

The other two examples I would list were live performances that left lasting impressions. Both memories date back to the early years of my encounter with the performing arts. Maybe that’s true for most people – there’s a time when one is fully open to the experience, unencumbered by the habits that develop later, when everything is filtered through analysis and professional curiosity. That habit is useful, of course, but it does take away from the joy of fully giving yourself over to the work.

This first I would name here isn’t technically an opera, but I’m going to count it anyway. After all, it has singing, it tells a story, and it’s staged – just through choreography. I’m talking about the Hamburg Ballet’s production of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, choreographed by John Neumeier, which was presented by the Toronto International Festival. It was completely mesmerizing.

Another unforgettable experience is Beatrice Chancy by James Rolfe and George Elliott Clarke. Queen of Puddings Music Theatre presented the premier production which featured an extraordinary group of Canadian artists then coming onto the scene: Measha Brueggergosman, Nigel Smith, Gregory Dahl, Marcus Nance, Lori Klassen and the late Lisa Lindo.

Favourite city that you’ve worked in?
Paris, largely because of fond memories—and the chance to practise la langue française. I toured the city several times with La La La Human Steps. From the dressing room side of the venue where we performed – the Théâtre de la Ville, right on the bank of the Seine – you could see Notre Dame to the left and the Eiffel Tower to the right; turning north, you could take in the grey rooftops of the central arrondissements. Stunning view.

I also had my own Phantom of the Opera moment at the Palais Garnier during a performance of Idomeneo. I’ll share more – if we ever meet in person.

How did you come to composing and what operatic works have you created so far?
Back when I was touring as pianist and music director for the production Amelia with La La La Human Steps, I befriended two string players, Simon Claude and Alexandre Castonguay, who indulged my fancy for writing little ditties to amuse our trio. Over the course of two years, we accumulated enough repertoire to make an album, which I called Picnic in the Cemetery in reference to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, near where my mother used to live.

With this work, along with a couple of song settings, I managed to secure a spot in Tapestry Opera’s LibLab Composer/Librettist Laboratory program.

Toronto has a long history of nurturing chamber opera creation, fostered by companies such as Tapestry, as well as Queen of Pudding Music Theatre in earlier years, and more recently Against the Grain Theatre and a number of smaller indie opera companies producing original Canadian works. I am grateful to Wayne Strongman for looking past my lack of a conventional resumé or formal training and inviting me into LibLab as a composer. That was the first time someone addressed me as such, and it gave me the encouragement to continue down this path.

Through LibLab, I met Anna Chatterton, with whom I wrote my first opera, knotty together, and Douglas Rodger, with whom I later wrote my most recent opera, The Futures Market.

Working with playwrights led me to opportunities within the theatre scene more broadly. I began submitting work to festivals such as Rhubarb (at Buddies in Bad Times) and SummerWorks. To date, all of my works that have been presented have been housed within theatre or interdisciplinary venues and festivals.

My works fall broadly within the music theatre genre, a category in which I also place opera. 

I created a concert-theatre piece based on my album Picnic in the Cemetery. I wrote a music-theatre work Mr. Shi and His Lover with Wong Teng Chi, a Macau-based librettist. The work became the first Mandarin-language work presented at both Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron is a staged song cycle produced for Canadian Stage, set to the poetry of contemporary Chinese worker-poet Xu Lizhi. The work has since toured to the PuSh Festival and OzAsia Festival in Adelaide. I also made the short opera film Death Mask with filmmaker John Greyson telling the story of Li Shiu Tong, the lover of Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist and gay rights advocate in 1930s Germany. 

More details about these works can be found at musicpicnic.com.

If you weren’t a composer, you’d be..?
Running a Chinese-Indonesian noodle shop.

What are you currently working on?
I’ve just released an opera series on YouTube called The Futures Market, with a libretto by Douglas Rodger. The full playlist can be found at musicpicnic.com/digital.

I’m also working on an opera inspired by a Kafka legend with playwright Liza Balkan. In addition, I’ve begun discussions with Anna Chatterton about creating a companion piece to our first opera, knotty together, a queer romantic comedy written twenty years ago. As Anna and I grow older, we feel that the characters have aged alongside us. Through their later stories, this sequel will explore aging and queerness.

Alongside these projects, I’m completing a VR (virtual reality) work that features music from Picnic in the Cemetery.

What’s your favourite opera house?
We often forget what we have. So I’d like to acknowledge The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Toronto is really lucky to have a purpose-built opera house to enjoy the art form.

Who is a composer whose work you admire that is currently working?
Gabriel Yared, a Lebanese-French composer most known for his film scores.  Although I am not as familiar with his more recent work, his scores on The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley really stay with me. 

Who is a composer whose work you admired from the past? 
Having grown up listening to classical music, there are of course many composers who would fit the bill. But if I had to name just one, Ravel would be it. If I were stranded on a desert island, I’d want the second movement of his Piano Concerto in G major to keep me company.

And to name someone more contemporary and from outside the classical world, a Canadian icon: Leonard Cohen.

What’s the strangest/funniest thing that has happened to you on stage? 
Well, this didn’t happen on stage, but it did happen while I was on tour. I was checking out a two-seater SMART car parked on the street near Saint-Eustache – this was in the early days of its introduction – when I looked up and saw that Russell Braun was inspecting the same car from the other side.

Mr. Braun doesn’t know me, so he wouldn’t remember this moment. The next time I happen to spot him in person though, I should use it as a conversation opener by asking whether he recalls once checking out a SMART car on a Paris street.

What’s your favourite orchestral instrument? Why? 
Oboe – Gabriel’s Oboe from The Mission soundtrack by Morricone.

What’s something most people don’t know about opera life? 
Fellow composers will recognize this; it’s part of the job, to a greater or lesser degree. A great deal of my time as an indie opera creator happens off the page – writing proposals/reports, seeking out presentation opportunities, and staying connected with audiences. When it comes to creation, a significant amount of time is dedicated to working closely with collaborators on the dramaturgy of the piece. The actual composing, more often than not, gets pushed to the very end – usually right up against the first score reading.

I would walk into the rehearsal room fearing the worst. And while the reading process inevitably reveals things I want to revise or rethink, the performers’ artistry and their commitment to the task at hand always end up elevating the score well beyond my expectations, rescuing me, at the last moment, from a total collapse from self-doubt.

Which role do you wish you could sing, but is not in your voice type? 
In one parallel reality of the multiverse, I would be The Queen of the Night. In another, I would be a countertenor and I would want to play Giustino just so I can sing “Vedrò con mio diletto.”

What are you afraid of? 
That I haven’t discovered what I’m meant to be doing with this life. 

What is one surprising thing that you have learned in becoming an opera composer?  
Perhaps it isn’t surprising – it certainly makes sense – but it wasn’t something I had fully considered until I began setting text in different languages. Musicality is inherent in the language itself, not to mention the very specific cultural context it carries. If Puccini had decided to set Turandot in Chinese, I don’t think he would have composed the same score.

What’s your favourite mind-calming practice? 
Back when I was doing step classes, I remember them as rare moments when I was truly present – and that, in itself, was calming. By the time we decipher the instructor’s directions and translate them into movement, there’s very little mental space left to worry about anything else.

These days, I enjoy a good walk to the lake. I’m about half an hour from the waterfront in Toronto. Taking these walks allows me to appreciate not only the water of Lake Ontario, but also the cityscape along the way, which I think is under-appreciated.

What’s your favourite movie? 
Rogue One is one of them.