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Villain / Akunin (2010) - ***½
This acclaimed film about class, crime, and romance that doubled as a commentary on the disconnection of modern Japan was a bit of a rarity on Hisaishi’s resume. Violence he wasn’t a stranger to thanks to earlier Kitano collaborations, but this kind of dour murder drama - the grimmest tale he’d provided music for since 1997’s Parasite Eve - was still an outlier for him. With its mix of strings, piano, and acoustic guitar, the music plays like a more clinical, minimalist cousin of the composer’s Fireworks score, coming much closer to his concert works from the aughts than any of his recent film scores, Sure, its small scale, restrained themes, and somewhat detached demeanor, while fine enough for the film, may leave many listeners cold, especially over a 40-minute album runtime. But the score lends mystery and eventually emotion to an otherwise bleak tale, at times becoming hypnotic and even somewhat gothic.
Villain secured Hisaishi his twelfth Japan Academy Prize nomination and seventh win. That win was likely facilitated by the film’s success in other categories, not just a bunch of nominations but also wins in all four acting categories. Furthermore, the competition in the best score category was not strong that year. Hisaishi was fortunate to not be up against Naoki Sato’s astonishing music for the live action Space Battleship Yamato movie, a puzzling omission not just due to its compositional quality but also because the film was decently reviewed and pulled in more money than all but three other 2010 Japanese films at the domestic box office. Still, it was an interesting change of pace for the composer after a decade populated with vast, sweeping scores.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/5lU0X18YxebHZnqDg44bVd?si=x0n6tro-QNmupa6QTNTYyQ
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Melodyphony (2010) - ****½
If you’ve never heard a Hisaishi compilation album before, then you might find his work with the LSO on Melodyphony, a film-focused companion to the Minima_Rhythm album he did with the same ensemble a year earlier, to be darn near perfect. If you’ve heard prior anthologies or concert recordings, then some parts will feel a tad familiar, the three represented Miyazaki works all capably performed but not arranged in particularly new ways. Still, Melodyphony should be mandatory listening for three reasons. First, it contains the rousing Water Traveler from the 1993 film Samurai Kids, a score unavailable in the U.S. outside of this album and another piece on Works I. Second, it contains a suite from Departures that is the best way to get introduced to the score. Third, the album debuted Hisaishi’s massive ten-minute Orbis, perhaps the first time he worked with organ. The concert piece seems to fuse the frenetic orchestral rhythms of Sinfonia for Chamber Orchestra with a more exultant version of the choir in the larger version of The End of the World, an attractive combination that makes Orbis one of the essential compositions of the back half of the composer’s career.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/3Ofc5o63VISy2y14grDpy1?si=_JkPIWVfQoqh9LcNQaHhVA
Recording videos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qWZbv7c8fI
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Clouds above the Hill Season 2 (2010) - ****
Several themes return, and not just Stand Alone; particularly impressive is how the composer migrates the energetic march heard in Wind of Ages on the season 1 album into more foreboding settings here, with its use in Great Powers and Japan backed by domineering brass reminiscent of Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet music. New material continues largely in the same style as the first season’s score, the highlights being the composer’s resolute Country Boys theme (written for the prior season but debuting on album here), The End of the House which equals the grand sense of elegant tragedy produced by I Want to Be a Shellfish, and the achingly romantic strings in Longing. Exceptions to the standard orchestral style include the imposing adversarial choir in Powerful Russia and what might be a balalaika in Ariadna evoking the serene seaside moments of Porco Rosso. If you liked the first season’s score, you’ll probably like this one just as much, if not more so. The album closes with a new version of Stand Alone with vocals by Japanese soprano Maki Mori, which makes for a superior version to the one sung by Sarah Brightman in the first season.
Most of the album - https://youtu.be/PmOsKyBOw8A?si=hEqtvqGO5EAcyPfJ
Maki Mori Stand Alone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA4ZUFzxSio
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Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess (2010) - ***
Discovery #41.
For this 12-minute short directed by Miyazaki that has only been shown at Ghibli-related museums and theme parks, Hisaishi recorded a series of variations on Antonio Vivaldi’s La Folia. It’s charming and doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it also has little of Hisaishi’s compositional voice, and thus may not be a necessary listen for most folks.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/20agBrCTCMFEDVt1pMW13u?si=-bnlMYwGT3-ZJ6eAk7ceeQ
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Ni No Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn (2010) - ****½
This fantastical video game about a boy traveling to another world to try to bring back his mom was originally dreamed up by Japanese game maker Level-5 but quickly morphed into a collaboration with Studio Ghibli, whose animators produced the cutscenes and whose art style generally influenced the design of the game. It thus became the first Ghibli production that Hisaishi scored that didn’t involve Hayao Miyazaki. “Studio Ghibli wanted me to join them. I met with [Level-5 founder Akihiro Hino] and I knew that only something good could come from [his] enthusiasm. They wanted to create a proper work of fantasy with music everyone can enjoy. Something nostalgic, but still connected to the future.” That last sentence could very well be a succinct summary for what many find so evocative about Hisaishi’s music in general.
Ni No Kuni is very much a score that synthesizes a lot of the stylistic elements of earlier Hisaishi scores. You get the orchestral might of The Legend and I Want to Be a Shellfish, with some of the marital style of Clouds above the Hill thrown in for good measure. There is the same underlying sense of magic that pervaded Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo. The early Motorville suggests the composer’s love of George Gerswhin’s music was still alive and well. Even the idyllic, bird-like fluttering flutes from Castle in the Sky that recalled Ottorino Respighi reappear in one track. But more than anything else the score recalls the same episodic kind of fantasy-flavored musical journey that Spirited Away took listeners on. Hisaishi had suggested the influence of certain classical composers before in conveying a sense of the fantastic and mystical, namely Igor Stravinsky, but this score is so supersaturated with a sense of dreamy magic and wild instrumental colors that I wouldn’t be surprised if some listeners mistook it for something by Alexander Scriabin.
That’s not to say there are no recurring themes; this isn’t Tom Thumb we’re talking about. Ni No Kuni received a free-flowing adventure theme for the protagonist (one that the composer said came to him with remarkable ease) as well as a rousing brass fanfare. Both are memorably deployed without overstaying their welcome, the composer returning to his days of judicious thematic spotting. A grim theme for the villain Shadar lurks in a few later tracks, with the composer intertwining it with our hero’s theme at one point to perhaps suggest their shared fate that would be revealed near the end of the game. And the theme for the boy’s mother proved that few score composers working at the time were better at breaking your heart, with the composer introducing Allie’s soulful melody on piano in an early sad track and revisiting the idea in a powerful ensemble format in his original finale piece titled Miracle (Reunion).
There’s also a sense of the medieval in the tunes and instrumentation used in several places. Hisaishi attributed this to a desire to lean towards folk music, in particular Irish folk music, to help define some of the realms. Some passages in this vein come closer to styles the composer toyed with over two decades earlier on the image albums for Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky; those elements didn’t make it into either of those film’s eventual scores but are most welcome here.
Hisaishi’s exciting, sumptuous music received praise from many video game reviewers, though a handful noted it may not have been appropriately applied into the game. Composers who regularly work on video games like Bear McCreary and Austin Wintory have noted how much music has to be written and recorded these days so that the music can avoid getting stale and so that the music can adjust to the player’s actions to make the game more immersive. But Hisaishi only wrote 21 tracks (the piano sketches of which were all done in a week), and Level-5 appears to have dropped many of those into the game exactly as written, great for the cutscenes and less so for other moments. As the gaming website Kotaku noted, “You'll hear [the battle music] hundreds of times, but often only the first twenty or thirty seconds. Most fights in this game are over in that amount of time, meaning that it's only on rare occasions that the composition even reaches the point where it settles into a groove.”
Hisaishi didn’t write all of the score. Composer Rei Kondoh, who’d written some of the music used in the earlier video games Devil May Cry 4 and Bayonetta, provided some supplementary material. As I believe none of that has ever been released on album, all I have to go off of is the website Eurogamer suggesting it was “standard-issue MIDI battle music.”
The game was released in Japan for the Nintendo DS in late 2010, and an album of Hisaishi’s 21 recorded pieces was issued early the following year. An “enhanced” release for Sony’s Playstation 3 console called Ni No Kuni: The Wrath of the White Witch came out in November 2011 and featured an extension of the game’s main storyline, and that version of the game eventually reached the U.S. in 2013. To coincide with the game’s Western release, the relatively new French music label Wayô Records released a 2CD set, with the first disc duplicating the 2011 Japanese score album and the second covering close to 30 minutes of new music the composer wrote for the expanded PS3 version of the game as well as the theme song in English. The cacophonous new opening to the main theme track was a delight, a new ragtime version of the theme for the hero’s fairy companion Drippy made for toe-tapping fun, and the Battle music got a more exciting up-tempo arrangement. Some of the new suspense music was comparatively less remarkable, but overall the additional 2011 music was still a worthwhile continuation of the concept, likely deserving of **** on its own.
2013 album - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAP97hPyplzKtqMcwOYm9YS48CpV5SDZs
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Clouds above the Hill Season 3 (2011) - ****
Aside from the new Wrath of the White Witch material, 2011 seemed like a year of relative inactivity for Hisaishi. There were no new film scores, though likely some early work was being done for Miyazaki’s next movie. But thankfully there was still music needed for the final season of NHK’s epic drama. The second season had culminated with the advent of the Russo-Japanese conflict, and thus for the third season Hisaishi migrated several of his themes from earlier seasons into more of an epic war setting, with the drama and action cranked to eleven. Shades of Gustav Holst’s famed concert work The Planets loom over several tracks, not just the expected Mars, the Bringer of War movement (a fairly standard reference point in combat music) but also the lumbering bombast of Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age. New to this season was a melody for naval combat that has the composer delivering some thrilling swashbuckling ruckus. The series’ music wrapped with a gorgeous choral version of the Stand Alone theme featuring lead vocals by Hisaishi’s daughter Mai Fujisawa.
The album also included 16 minutes of bonus tracks from the prior seasons, yet another piano-centric variation on Stand Alone, and a Japanese orchestra’s take on the eleven-minute suite of season 1 music the composer had recorded with the LSO for Melodyphony. That may bother listeners averse to redundancy, but the album still includes over 40 minutes of impressive new material from season 3, bringing three years of strong music for the series to a very entertaining close.
The Sky Is Clear But the Waves are High - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA-KaUBa8io
The Battle of the Sea of Japan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vB_qCL3C3Y
Stand Alone finale - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ0wBJEztok
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Tenchi: The Samurai Astronomer / Tenchi meisatsu (2012) - ***½
2012 was similar to 2011 in terms of released works. Hisaishi delivered a new studio album of piano and string quartet recordings inspired by the works of Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and M. C. Escher, akin to 1992’s My Lost City being inspired by the books of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and otherwise there was only this film score for a biopic about the 1600s scholar Shibukawa Shunkai who created a new calendar. It was to Hisaishi’s expanded orchestral style from the last decade what 1996’s Kids Return was to his earlier contemporary scores, delivering a pervasive “I’ve heard you do something like this before” sense of familiarity despite juggling several memorable themes and featuring the composer’s usually fine orchestration. The film wasn’t a big success, but Hisaishi’s score still got a Japan Academy Prize nomination.
Last track - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3952diVecxQ
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Next time: The composer compensates for two years of comparatively few releases by delivering six scores in one year.
