Sakamoto has meant a lot to me over the past few decades, so I was happy to see that OPUS is screening at one of my local arthouse theaters at the end of the month. I can’t wait.
Very late to this but Opus sounds, in some ways, a translation of his last concerts—I was lucky to see one of them, “works a kind of magic as it goes along” is a good description. The progression of songs was pretty well-calculated (he finished with the theme from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and it was just incredibly moving, every feeling from that film came through in the keys in part because you were so prepped for it). A lot of that comes from physical presence, though—it sounds like a lot of care was put into modulating the visual language of the film and I look forward to seeing how it compares.
Between this and Coda I think we’ve gotten a lot of late-period, pensive Sakamoto and I feel like it’s kind of overshadowed his earlier stuff. I highly recommend seeking out (it’s been uploaded various places online) the 1985 (TV) documentary Tokyo Melody, which is the source of many of the clips of younger Sakamoto you see excerpted in places like Coda. It’s at an interesting point of his career, right before his turn from a primarily Japan-focused to a more globally-oriented recording artist, and you get a sense of his work when it was at the technical cutting edge. It also has one of my favorite filmed piano performances, too—an energetic four-hands duet with his then-wife intercut with a stadium show of the same melody, and the piano duet’s the more exciting half. It’s a side of Sakamoto I wish we’d have seen more of on film.
Amazing that you got to see him perform a show like this, though point definitely taken about the earlier work. You can be told about Sakamoto's innovations in electronic music, but you would certainly not get any hint of that from a film like OPUS.
Coming back to this thread having just seen Opus and it was tremendously moving. “The Last Emperor” was my favorite of the interpretations here, maybe because it’s also one of my favorite scores (and was my introduction to the guy, wound up with where I was in life at the time, which was actually a very good place but paired with a real sense of dislocation), just a lot of emotional complexity expressed by the song and a lot of very deep feelings brought up in me.
There is a connection of sorts to Tokyo Melody, though, kind of. His four-hands performance of “Tong Poo” with his then-wife in Tokyo Melody was an impromptu thing, just very effortless. Here the arrangement’s obviously simpler because it’s one person, but it’s something to see him struggle starting it out (on the heels of getting frustrated with the previous song, too). There’s a real sense of accomplishment in him picking his hands up and getting the song rolling, mixed with sadness that this was something he could just casually do before.
He ended the performance I saw with “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” too, but I remember the live performance being softer. There was a real sense of renewal or rebirth in the interpretation of “Mr. Lawrence,” which was a great note to (almost) finish on.
TOKYO MELODY is indeed a wonderful documentary. I loved hearing his views on music and Japanese culture in general.
While I didn't get to see one of these last concerts, I was fortunate to catch Sakamoto on tour a couple decades back when he was promoting BTTB and CINEMAGE. The venue was the TLA in Philadelphia and he did a brief DJ set before taking his place behind one of the two pianos on stage. (The second was a prepared one, which he switched to for two or three pieces in the middle of the set.) That's an evening I'll never forget.
Sakamoto has meant a lot to me over the past few decades, so I was happy to see that OPUS is screening at one of my local arthouse theaters at the end of the month. I can’t wait.
Very late to this but Opus sounds, in some ways, a translation of his last concerts—I was lucky to see one of them, “works a kind of magic as it goes along” is a good description. The progression of songs was pretty well-calculated (he finished with the theme from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and it was just incredibly moving, every feeling from that film came through in the keys in part because you were so prepped for it). A lot of that comes from physical presence, though—it sounds like a lot of care was put into modulating the visual language of the film and I look forward to seeing how it compares.
Between this and Coda I think we’ve gotten a lot of late-period, pensive Sakamoto and I feel like it’s kind of overshadowed his earlier stuff. I highly recommend seeking out (it’s been uploaded various places online) the 1985 (TV) documentary Tokyo Melody, which is the source of many of the clips of younger Sakamoto you see excerpted in places like Coda. It’s at an interesting point of his career, right before his turn from a primarily Japan-focused to a more globally-oriented recording artist, and you get a sense of his work when it was at the technical cutting edge. It also has one of my favorite filmed piano performances, too—an energetic four-hands duet with his then-wife intercut with a stadium show of the same melody, and the piano duet’s the more exciting half. It’s a side of Sakamoto I wish we’d have seen more of on film.
Amazing that you got to see him perform a show like this, though point definitely taken about the earlier work. You can be told about Sakamoto's innovations in electronic music, but you would certainly not get any hint of that from a film like OPUS.
Coming back to this thread having just seen Opus and it was tremendously moving. “The Last Emperor” was my favorite of the interpretations here, maybe because it’s also one of my favorite scores (and was my introduction to the guy, wound up with where I was in life at the time, which was actually a very good place but paired with a real sense of dislocation), just a lot of emotional complexity expressed by the song and a lot of very deep feelings brought up in me.
There is a connection of sorts to Tokyo Melody, though, kind of. His four-hands performance of “Tong Poo” with his then-wife in Tokyo Melody was an impromptu thing, just very effortless. Here the arrangement’s obviously simpler because it’s one person, but it’s something to see him struggle starting it out (on the heels of getting frustrated with the previous song, too). There’s a real sense of accomplishment in him picking his hands up and getting the song rolling, mixed with sadness that this was something he could just casually do before.
He ended the performance I saw with “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” too, but I remember the live performance being softer. There was a real sense of renewal or rebirth in the interpretation of “Mr. Lawrence,” which was a great note to (almost) finish on.
TOKYO MELODY is indeed a wonderful documentary. I loved hearing his views on music and Japanese culture in general.
While I didn't get to see one of these last concerts, I was fortunate to catch Sakamoto on tour a couple decades back when he was promoting BTTB and CINEMAGE. The venue was the TLA in Philadelphia and he did a brief DJ set before taking his place behind one of the two pianos on stage. (The second was a prepared one, which he switched to for two or three pieces in the middle of the set.) That's an evening I'll never forget.