Leslie Uyeda
Leslie Uyeda is a composer, conductor and pianist living in Vancouver, Canada. She composes for voice, piano, choirs, solo instruments and ensembles, including two operas: When the Sun Comes Out (2013), and Silence (world premiere June 2025).
Latest News
The reviews on Silence are in!
New album released: The Sex Lives of Vegetables
The provocatively titled The Sex Lives of Vegetables: Music of Leslie Uyeda is the first solo recording for revered Vancouver-based composer, conductor and pianist Leslie Uyeda, and it showcases her deep affinity for the human voice. Uyeda has worked extensively with the celebrated Canadian poet and author Lorna Crozier, and has composed over sixty songs with Crozier’s gorgeous and dramatic poetry. This new CD includes The First Woman, a song cycle of four songs for soprano and piano, with poems chosen from The Apocrypha of Light, and the three volumes of The Sex Lives of Vegetables, using fifteen poems from The Garden Going On Without Us. Included on the album is one of Uyeda’s recent works for solo piano - Hahawo Shinobite 母を偲びて (I Cherish and Honour my Mother). The featured performers are all renowned interpreters of contemporary music — soprano Heather Pawsey, pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, and clarinettist AK Coope.
Listen to an interview about the CD from CBC’s Saskatchewan Weekend with Shauna Powers here.
“Silence, the character, was sung by Toronto-based soprano Teiya Kasahara; one of their specialties is singing Mozart’s Queen of the Night, and Uyeda gave them plenty of stratospheric tessitura to flash.
Ymma (Lara Ciekiewicz) too was comfortable in the extremes of the soprano range, and when the two sopranos ere in musical dialogue, their penetrating sound delivered inevitably dramatic effect.
Budget constraints gave Uyeda just six musicians to write for, but the six – a violinist, cellist, clarinettist, flautist, percussionist and pianist – created a sound world that accentuated the singers’ parts, and told the story in musically interesting ways, sometimes in ensemble with the singers, sometimes in their own gloss on the opera’s narrative flow. Percussionist Brian Thurgood and flautist Petar Dundjerski made an especially strong impression, with Uyeda’s variety of colours.”
— Opera Canada, June 23, 2025 by Bill Rankin
“A theatrically satisfying addition to new Canadian opera repertoire”
“This new addition to the opera repertoire, adapted from a fascinating play, has a challenging score by Vancouver composer Leslie Uyeda, [which nevertheless] sounded grateful to sing and skillfully kept the [dramatic] pace going.”
— Edmonton Scene, July 21, 2025 by Mark Morris
“You can see the attraction of the play to an opera company — big characters that seem even bigger in a small-scale production, a fulsome story, [and capitalizing] on the artifices of opera to give the period rhythms of the language a kind of enjoyable natural comedy.
Silence is a fascinating debut, ambitious and theatrically challenging.”
— 12thNight.ca, June 24, 2025 by Liz Nicholls
“This is the first full-length album to feature Leslie Uyeda’s music, apparently. We want more.”
“a striking and quirky pair of song cycles”