18 Mar 2025
Posted by Kelly Fleck 
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Kevin Lau’s Kimiko’s Pearl Symphonic Suite makes its world premiere with the Toronto Symphony Opera. Artwork above: Norman Takeuchi, Kimiko’s Pearl – Epilogue (detail), 2024, acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy: Norman Takeuchi.
TORONTO — Kimiko’s Pearl explores the story of a Japanese Canadian family in a way it has never been before—through ballet. Commissioned and produced by Bravo Niagara!, the ballet is inspired by the family history of co-founders and mother-daughter team Christine Mori and Alexis Spieldenner.
The ballet centres around a teenage girl named Kimiko, who discovers an old family trunk with a forgotten diary and other precious keepsakes. Through music and dance, her family’s story comes to life, from immigrating to Canada in 1917 and building a life as berry farmers in Mission, B.C., to surviving the internment and rebuilding their lives in Toronto after the war.
Mori and Spieldenner assembled a world-class team of creatives to bring Kimiko’s Pearl to life, including award-winning Canadian composer Kevin Lau, who created the beautiful original music for the ballet.
“Music and dance are the two great nonverbal arts, where they can convey so much emotion and so much meaning, but not through the medium of language,” Lau tells Nikkei Voice in an interview. “The pairing of the two was something that I felt would be a really unusual, powerful and dramatic vehicle for telling the story. To be a part of that was really important to me.”
Canadian composer Kevin Lau. Photo credit: David Leyes.
Lau is one of Canada’s most versatile and sought-after young composers, working in orchestral, chamber, ballet, opera, and film music. His work has been performed nationally and internationally in the U.S., Denmark, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hong Kong.
Lau wrote the music for four instruments (violin, cello, flute, and harp), and working with recording engineer and sound designer Aaron Tsang, set the stage for a grand and sweeping story that spanned generations.
Kimiko’s Pearl made its two-night world premiere in St. Catharines in June 2024. Nearly a year later, Kimiko’s Pearl continues to grow. Now, Lau’s Kimiko’s Pearl Symphonic Suite will make its world premiere with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra at Roy Thompson Hall on April 9 and 11. Co-commissioned by Bravo Niagara! and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the suite expands the musical scope while drawing on themes of hope, resilience, and transformation from the original ballet.
“It’s an incredible feeling to come back to the TSO with something on this scale, says Lau. “This is a 20-minute work for orchestra, which is a rare opportunity for a composer working in the 21st century. To be able to take all of the themes both narratively and musically from the original ballet and the emotional arc that it had, and basically give it a second go, but on a completely different canvas.”
To create the symphonic suite, Lau wanted to highlight the themes central to Kimiko’s Pearl, such as hope, loss, and resilience, purely through music. Part of the creative team for Kimiko’s Pearl from the very beginning—almost four years ago—it was hard to imagine telling the story without the choreography by Yosuke Mino of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, he says.
The symphonic suite is not simply a medley of highlights from the ballet but a new piece of music, capturing the narrative and emotion of the ballet through a full orchestra. Musically, Lau aimed to distill the experiences of four generations of a family through the internment. Capturing the hope and promise of arriving in Canada, despair and loss during the internment, starting fresh after the war, but with the loss of identity and culture, and finally, reconciliation and putting the pieces back together.
“It’s both much shorter than the original ballet, and much grander and richer in texture,” says Lau. “It’s like the canvas it was painted on has expanded beyond its original scope. To have an opportunity to take all of that material and run it through this new medium and try to find the same heart to the music that the ballet had has been wonderful.”
As Lau explored how to tell this story, both in composing the ballet and the symphonic suite, healing became an important theme to carry through.
“I got the sense in speaking with Christine [Mori] and eventually with more and more people involved that this was an opportunity to be part of a healing process through art,” says Lau. “A very wide-ranging healing process—one that begins with someone like me who is actually just learning about the details of what happened, that then spreads outward to an entire community who without knowing it, might be hungry for some kind of artistic form of catharsis.”
Kimiko’s Pearl Symphonic Suite premieres with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in Toronto on April 9 and 11. Photo credit: Allan Cabral.
Lau wanted to create lyrical music that flowed and connected from beginning to end. There is a sense of healing from surrendering oneself to the music and trusting it to guide you through the story, through pain and hardship to reconciliation.
While composing the symphonic suite, the theme of healing resonated deeply in Lau’s life. He and his wife were staying at the Ronald McDonald House as their infant son recovered from a liver transplant after being diagnosed with a rare liver condition at just two months old. Thankfully, his son is doing well, and the family hopes to return home to Ottawa together soon.
“I wrote it during a time when my son was undergoing a lengthy recovery. I was not at home when I wrote it. I was basically next to SickKids [Hospital] all the time, and the theme of healing kept coming back to me and the feeling of what music can do,” says Lau.
While working with fellow creatives on Kimiko’s Pearl, the team’s diverse identities and experiences enriched and overlapped with the story in unique ways. For Mori and Spieldenner, the ballet was based on their family story. Choreographer Yosuke Mino drew from his experience as a new immigrant from Japan, while Howard Reich, who wrote the script, brought his perspective as a child of two Holocaust survivors. For Lau, he thought of his mother, who was interned as a child with her family in an internment camp in India.
The overlapping experiences and identities are part of what made Kimiko’s Pearl so powerful. Exploring painful and dark histories, like Japanese Canadian history, through art is part of human nature because art often reflects the world around us, says Lau. But when these stories are told with care and integrity, they can leave a lasting impression on those who come in contact with it.
“I think that art that reflects difficult history is in some sense inevitable. It has to happen because when we create, we create based on the truest parts of ourselves, ideally. And the truest parts of ourselves are going to include our history,” says Lau.
“When I think of my own experience, and I think of the art that has moved me, sometimes I come into contact with art or a piece of music even that sheds light on something that I was not familiar with or that I was familiar with but had some distance with. And if the music is done well, if the art is done well, it can completely transform my relationship to that. And so that’s really what I’m hoping for.”
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Kevin Lau’s Kimiko’s Pearl Symphonic Suite makes its world premiere with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on April 9 and 11 at Roy Thomson Hall.
Tickets and more information here.
To learn more about Kimiko’s Pearl, please visit www.kimikospearl.com.
