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.
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.