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LIkely owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, almost no new Hisaishi works were released in 2020. However, while holed up in his house with his daughter the two of them did put out a lovely song version of Two of Us from Chizuko’s Younger Sister as a remembrance to director Nobuhiko Obayashi, one of the composer’s earliest recurring collaborators who sadly passed away from lung cancer in April 2020 at the age of 82.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOybVEoge_o
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Soul Snatcher / Chě hú shūshēng (2020) - ***˝
A costume fantasy film that in any other part of the world probably would’ve had its release postponed until 2021, Soul Snatcher ended up not making much of a dent at the Chinese box office when it came out in December 2020 and only remains notable for its music being written by Joe Hisaishi, doing his first mainland Chinese film since 2007’s The Sun Also Rises. It’s a return to the entertaining East/West adventure sound that was a regular part of his output from 2005-2013, with various regional instruments layered over an orchestra and several percussive action passages. Repeated crashes carry over from the prior year’s NiNoKuni. But Soul Snatcher also has some commonalities with 2019’s Children of the Sea, with smaller groups often playing instead of a full ensemble and its personality not defined by overly memorable recurring themes. A few passages recall the wistful melancholy of his Kitano scores. A 79-minute album runtime, the longest of the composer’s career, may test the patience of some listeners, especially without any knockout melodies, but the composer’s craftsmanship and sense of style keeps the work interesting throughout.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/2FNZ5VQ1qbxZbc8TjfZvhN?si=-KW0ASyGTwmLTnZGflQezQ
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Minima_Rhythm IV (2021) - ****1/2
“The soloist takes responsibility for the orchestra. So in that sense I try to make the most of the instrument.”
The fourth release in Hisaishi’s concert music series debuted his first concertos, one for double bass that was premiered in 2015 and recorded in 2017 and the other for three French horns that was recorded live in early 2020. The contrabass concerto was done for acclaimed bass player Shigeru Ishikawa, who’s currently a member of Tokyo’s Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. “First he sent me the rough sketches. It was too difficult to play right away. All [those] sixteenth notes. It looks like a cello concerto! [And] the third movement harmony [is] very difficult. A month later, I could get the image of the fingering and bowing at a slow tempo. When I thought I was finally able to do it, I received a [piece of] mail. It was a revised version, which was changed completely!” Hisaishi laughed when hearing that last part and said the revision came about because he found “some problems” during the process of orchestrating his composition.
While the lively first and third movements will be easily identifiable as Hisaishi concert creations, the middle movement goes in a surprisingly swinging direction, the bass sometimes leading the ensemble melodically and other times shifting to more of a walking bass performance, much to the delight of Ishikawa. “Pizzicato in the second movement - usually it’s a backing performance, playing for the accompaniment. The idea was so novel. [Hisaishi] said he doesn’t know about jazz too much. [But] he uses a lot of fourth interval harmonies, which creates a jazzy taste.” The contrabass concerto was for my money the first concert piece of Hisaishi’s to rise to the level of his exquisite Sinfonia for Chamber Orchestra.
The other piece on the album, The Border: Concerto for 3 Horns and Orchestra, came about because one of the players (Nobuaki Furukawa) suggested it, though he later expressed surprise that it was more than a work for horn and piano. “I never expected a concerto.” Insane volleys of horn notes in the first movement recall the rapid-fire brass material in Don Davis’ Matrix scores. The third movement finds the composer returning to the Leonard Bernstein-like ensemble rhythms that informed parts of The East Land Symphony, the horns racing through complicated lines with astonishing ease before bringing the piece to a raucous, fanfare-like close (somehow, an audience member close to the stage slept through most of this). The middle movement may challenge some listeners, with the piece suggesting you’d stumbled into an empty hall where a horn player is rehearsing a Mahler symphony, though that would overlook the dreamy feel of the movement’s second half as well as the atypical performance techniques used by the two supporting horns like playing near their lowest register at the start and imitating ethereal voices later on by pulling out their mouthpieces and only playing through those.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/4E6ic6qxhtxf89Jw84QHnF?si=7oa37tsGT_2uWy91znFmHA
Live performance of The Border starting at 17:45 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGVWCR2IY1U
Interview with Hisaishi and the featured players - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zly4mELexb0
Interview with Shigeru Ishikawa - https://contrabassconversations.com/2015/12/28/cbc-169-shigeru-ishikawa-interview/
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Symphony #2 (2021) - ****˝
Compared to The East Land Symphony, which Hisaishi worked on for seven years, this symphony (his third, despite its name) was much easier to create, the composer writing the work in full across 2020 and 2021. Like Sinfonia for Concert Orchestra, the piece starts with a descending motif, but here set against an ascending, yearning cello line, creating a magical environment before shifting to something more resilient as higher strings, brass, and winds take turns with the cello melody. Buzzing horn parts akin to The Border take over midway through the first movement, which wraps with a brass fanfare of the piece’s motif amidst a wild flurry of mallet percussion. Playful string rhythms announce the second movement, with sparkling brass and winds jolting in every so often. Strings kick off the third movement with a round, the overlapping lines almost sounding Roman in a Respighi fashion before the piece transforms into a more sprightly one. An exuberant false ending (one that tricked at least one audience into applauding prematurely) leads into more of the reverent material that started the last movement. Hopefully this eventually gets an album release.
2021 also saw the composer debut two other concert works. The swirling, eleven-minute I Want to Talk to You for string quartet, percussion, and strings has the quartet dance around a simple melodic kernel before the ensemble gradually builds in intensity; as with The Border, it occasionally involves the players doing atypical things with their instruments (string bows being run along mallet percussion, a bass drum being tapped by someone’s fingers). Meanwhile, 2 Dances threw out cascades of jagged, intersecting rhythms in its first movement (likely appealing to fans of the controlled chaos of the works on Minima_Rhythm III) before pivoting to a less edgy movement with slight jazz overtones that loses none of the work’s forward momentum until its gossamer-light final minutes. The composer originally arranged the propulsive composition for a group of strings, winds, brass, percussion, and piano before debuting an orchestral arrangement in 2022 where the first movement starts to mirror the agitation of the larger presentation of The End of the World and the second’s climactic build-up once again suggests the composer’s affinity for George Gershwin.
Symphony #2 with the Strasbourg Philharmonic (audio only) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rERnRs9ya6k
I Want to Talk to You - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPOpocNbxrw
2 Dances for large ensemble - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSRZxGjewdo
2 Dances for orchestra - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAye2tN17BY
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A Symphonic Celebration: Music from the Studio Ghibli Films of Hayao Miyazaki (2023) - *****
Some folks (including me) had concerns going into this album, Hisaishi’s debut with Deutsche Grammophon after years of recording for Universal Music, about how essential it might be, given how often suites from the composer’s Miyazaki scores have been recorded and performed, including by other London orchestras. But the Royal Philharmonic sounds truly top-notch here, there are some nice new elements to the arrangements, and the clarity of the recording is tremendous. It's an open question if this is the best Hisaishi / Miyazaki album ever - and in some ways it’s better as a standalone audio experience than the impressive 2008 Budokan concert is, mainly because that concert was never really recorded with that in mind and thus some of the instrumental / vocal balance is a bit off (at least on the audio rip I rely on). Also, hearing Ponyo and Totoro sung in English should be an interesting surprise for many listeners.
The CD has one track per movie, with a 2CD version adding two bonus tracks on the second disc (neither one truly essential). The digital album breaks out the suites into separate tracks, and also puts the second CD’s bonus tracks at the start of the listening program. And yet that isn’t as weird as one aspect of the otherwise excellent CD packaging and liner notes - the track times aren't anywhere to be found!
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/561qUZZO6f2sILHUMlXmlM?si=ldwLQa69Q-iQ2gJf3-ar8g
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Next time: “I leave it all up to you.” The primary inspiration for doing this project.
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