Ryuichi Sakamoto’s professional musical career spanned almost five decades, starting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in the mid-1970s where he completed his master’s degree and then in experimental electronic music both as a co-founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra and his solo album Thousand Knives. He is, perhaps, most famously known in the Anglophone world for “Forbidden Colours”, the main theme from his composition for the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” (1983). This was also was his debut actor in the role of Captain Yonoi who a romantic interest in POW Maj. Jack “Strafer” Celliers, played by David Bowie. Sakamoto’s composition for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” (1987) would also win the Academy Award for Best Original Score, and he would be the composer of the opening ceremony of 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics, as well providing the first number one instrumental hit in Japan with “Energy Flow” (1999).
This is, of course, the barest description of a lifetime of work and achievements. But two recent performances are considered here, representing his final end-of-life works. Despite prodigious productivity, Sakamoto was first diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer in 2014, and would die from colorectal cancer at the age of 71 in March 2023. “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus” was been released as his final concert and film directed by his son, Neo Sora, only a few months before his death. There is a great starkness to the black-and-white film, there is no constructed narrative, just Sakamoto playing the music of his career with grave intensity. With some twenty pieces performed there is great beauty, simplicity, and slow deliberation throughout, whether one assesses from the opening “Lack of Love”, through to “Andata”, “Solitude”, or the closing “Opus” interspersed with, of course, “The Sheltering Sky”, “The Last Emperor”, and “Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence”.
As part of the Asia TOPA (Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts), Melbourne experienced “KAGAMI” (Japanese for “mirror”), a “mixed-reality” performance by Sakamoto and Tin Drum. Produced with dozens of cameras and using Magic Leap 2 headsets, Sakamoto becomes present in a concert made from photogrammetry with the addition of animated elements such as a piano and various effects; rain, rhizomes, clouds, etc. With the centre of the room reserved for where the apparition of Sakamoto is present, participants are encouraged to move around, allowing for both close proximity to Sakamoto but also rendering “real” people as an occasional outline of a figure, a fascinating inversion of reality. Assuming care is taken not to run into fellow concert-goers, it is possible to sit next to Sakamoto and intimately watch from a mere metre’s distance the performance, the facial expressions, the movement of his hair, and his fingers at they slow-dance across the animated keyboard. Like Opus, the works are played with additional deliberation where richness in emotion and sound is mixed with their evident simplicity creating that great term recognised in mathematics as the epitome of beauty; elegance.
To describe “Opus” and “KAGAMI” as “moving” would be quite the understatement. They are works of incredible artistic beauty, made only more poignant that they were produced as Sakamoto was more than well-aware that these were his final contributions to the world. It is often quite clear that when artistic endeavours are mediated by technology they run the risk of being captured by the technology available at the time; there is a grand succession of now-comical films and music which were seen as “advanced” at the time of their release. But where the artistry is dominant, whatever technology is used becomes quite secondary to the expression and the medium is not the message. Both “Opus” and “KAGAMI” are, in their own way, heavily mediated by contemporary technologies, but neither dull the artistic integrity of this great composer who is given a new permanence in these, final offerings, to his adoring audiences.
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