Dramatic escape now stuff of chamber opera

As part of HGOco s Song of Houston: East + West initiative, Houston Grand Opera presents its 47th world premiere, "New Arrivals." Composed by American John Glover, "New Arrivals" tells the real-life story of Houstonian Yani Rose Keo and her escape from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Photo: TODD SPOTH / Todd Spoth

Thursday, June 14, 2012
By Colin Eatock
Houston Chronicle (Houston, Texas, USA)

'New Arrivals'

HGOco will present five free performances. The first three will be concert versions with no staging. The final two will be full productions with sets.

• 1 p.m. Saturday: At the World Refugee Day Festival, Baker Ripley Neighborhood Center, 6500 Rookin
• 4 p.m. Sunday: Rothko Chapel, 3900 Yupon
• 7 p.m. Tuesday: Baker Ripley Neighborhood Center, 6500 Rookin
• 7:30 p.m. June 22 and 2 p.m. June 23: Asia Society Texas Center, 1370 Southmore. Reservations required for these performances; visit asiasociety.org/texas to request up to four free tickets.

April 3, 1975, is etched forever in Yani Rose Keo's memory. That was the day - just two weeks before Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge - she received a call from the U.S. Embassy advising her to leave the city immediately.

The Khmer Rouge were targeting educated people; Keo's husband was a high-ranking official, and she was a volunteer with an international refugee agency. After contacting her husband and scooping up her son, she headed for the airport to catch a flight to Bangkok, in neighboring Thailand.

"There were only three of us on the plane," she recalls. "We had only the clothes we were wearing. Bangkok is less than one hour from Phnom Penh, and I thought we'd come back in a few days. I never dreamed I'd become a refugee."

Keo lost just about everything that day: her possessions, her home, her friends and her place in the world. She never saw her parents again. Her entire extended family was wiped out in the killing fields of Cambodia.

"I was angry," says Keo, who now lives in Houston. "I thought, 'Why me? What did I do?' I had no money, no job, no place to stay."

Yet Keo's profound loss also marked the beginning of a new life.

Her loss and new beginning are intertwined in a new chamber opera, "New Arrivals," to be premiered by the Houston Grand Opera on Saturday.

The new opera is the brainchild of HGOco, Houston Grand Opera's company-within-a-company. It's part of the ongoing Song of Houston: East + West series of new chamber operas.

For the music, HGOco engaged the young composer John Glover. And for the libretto, playwright Catherine Filloux was chosen. Both reside in New York.

"Because I'm a Western composer," Glover says, "I didn't know much about Cambodian music or culture. So I went to Cambodia for two weeks and met with masters of traditional Cambodian music."

There, he discovered a kind of Buddhist chant called "smot" - and decided he would incorporate it into his one-act opera. To achieve this, HGOco has flown in Srey Pov, a Cambodian master of smot singing. Glover has written her into his opera - and she'll perform alongside Western classical musicians (a string quartet, a percussionist and four opera singers).

Filloux came to the project with an extensive knowledge of Cambodia. She wrote the text for another Cambodian-based opera, "Where Elephants Weep," which was staged in Phnom Penh in 2008.

She set the story of "New Arrivals" on an airplane - on a metaphorical journey of refugees in transit between their old and new lives.

"I'm very inspired," Filloux says, "at how Keo has transferred her pain of the loss of her family in the Cambodian genocide into a positive mechanism for helping other people."

That's exactly what Keo has been doing since she arrived in Houston - which was because of yet another dramatic twist in her life.

After Keo left Cambodia, she and her husband became separated. She went to Paris, where her other three children were in school, and he attempted to return to Cambodia. Then she learned that everyone who was on her husband's flight to Phnom Penh had been killed.

But seven months later, she received a phone call. Her husband had missed the flight to Cambodia and ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand, where he was sponsored by Catholic Charities to come to Houston.

Upon her own arrival in Houston, she began volunteering to help other refugees and then became a caseworker with Catholic Charities. In 1985, she helped establish the Alliance for Multicultural Community Services, an agency that has helped thousands of refugees from all over the world.

"That's what has kept me going for 37 years," Keo says, "helping other people."

Colin Eatock is a writer who covers classical music. He lives in Toronto.