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Ryuichi Sakamoto - Opus

Name: Ryuichi Sakamoto - Opus
Item: Ryuichi Sakamoto - Opus
Author: Adam Quarshie

Publicado
Aug 15, 2024
Escrito por
Adam Quarshie
Label
Milan
Estreno
August 2024
Genre
Classical

The renowned composer's last ever filmed performance is a meditation on resilience in the face of mortality.
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In the autumn of 2022, Ryuichi Sakamoto sat down in front of a Yamaha Grand in Tokyo's 509 recording studio, a large room said to contain the best acoustics in Japan. The musician and composer, best known for his breathtaking cinematic scores, spent the next nine days in that room, in what would become his final performance committed to film. The music he played included some of his most famous compositions, including Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and The Last Emperor, and would go on to form the basis of the black-and-white film, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus. The minimalist shots focused entirely on Sakamoto dressed in one of his sharp black suits, the camera hovering over his shoulder, observing his slender hands moving over the piano keys. At the heart of the film was a profound emotional weight. The intimate cinematography was devised by his son, Neo Sora, and it was the last creative project in the Oscar-winning artist's life. He passed away from cancer less than six months later, in March 2023, at the age of 71. Sakamoto's work as a founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra quickly made him a lauded electronic music pioneer. In the late '70s, the Tokyo band's playful use of emerging synthesiser technology was a precursor to the synth-pop and techno that rose in the following decade. As the members of the band all split off into solo careers, Sakamoto was primarily known for collaborating with a range of bold and ambitious filmmakers, including Oliver Stone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Brian de Palma and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Many of the films he worked on, such as The Revenant or The Last Emperor, dealt with themes of cultural rupture or protagonists battling against epic landscapes, and his stirring compositions matched these narratives immaculately. Split over two sides, each featuring 10 pieces, Opus is a deeply personal collection of Sakamoto's most treasured compositions. Listening outside the film's context, I wondered whether the tracks would feel untethered and somewhat barren, but instead, they have more colour than their stark visuals. His most beloved songs have space to breathe, such as "Agua," a piece from his 1999 piano solo album BTTB, which gently swirls around its central ascending chords. On a technical level, the piano playing on the album is simple and elegant, if slightly formulaic at times. If you're seeking virtuoso performance or experimental composition, you won't find it here. The true magic of Opus is that Sakamoto, in his declining health, wanted to give us a parting gift at all. If you allow yourself to fully tune in and listen closely, tiny details begin to appear which tell a sobering story about what was happening during the recording process. For the first nine seconds of "Bibo no Aozora," taken from his 1995 Latin-influenced album Smoochy, you can hear the shuffling of papers and the movement of hands. Such moments hint at the intimacy of the recording session, in which Sakamoto and Sora would frequently have been the only people in the room, bound by their personal relationship as much as their creative one. In other pieces, such as "for Jóhann" and "Ichimei - small happiness," you can hear Sakamoto's intakes of breath, indicating the physical labour it costs a man in ailing health to sit in front of a piano—itself an instrument with a powerful physical presence and mechanical complexity—and play uninterrupted for so long. In these moments, however subtle, the album is at its most raw and powerful. Despite the inherent tragedy of a renowned and beloved composer having to reckon with mortality, the record remains deeply human, never quite succumbing to gloom. The album is not really about technical wizardry or structural experimentation. Sakamoto never promised this. It could also be argued that Sakamoto wasn't the best pianist—the world primarily saw him as a composer. On Opus, there are certainly moments where it feels difficult to distinguish between tracks, with most of these inhabiting a similar range of tempo and tone. The opening four tracks, "Lack of Love," "BB," "Andata" and "Solitude," for example, are all based around minor keys, and their unhurried, pensive rhythms can feel ever so slightly plodding at times. There are, however, occasional moments where more unusual, even slightly abrasive timbres shine through. On "20180219 (w/prepared piano)," Sakamoto fastens clothespins to piano strings. As he carefully plucks the metallic strings, it results in an unsettling, dissonant rattle—a welcome diversion from the album's more conventional melodies. Meanwhile, "Aubade 2020," originally written for a pharmaceutical commercial, has a brisk and upbeat step. This song's warm, tumbling melody feels refreshing alongside some of his more sombre offerings, and demonstrates Sakamoto's ability to treat what some would regard as somewhat superficial projects with depth and purpose. While the overall tone of one of Sakamoto's last gifts to us is one of soft melancholy, there are bright flickers of hope in the staff lines of his most recognisable songs. One of the most energising passages is "Tong Poo," his first composition for Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978, which would become one of the band's most famous songs. Another standout moment includes a heart-wrenching version of one of his classics, "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence," painstakingly slowed down to allow the weight of its lower register notes to resound. With "Opus - Ending," the album closes full of yearning and subtle chord changes and ends on an unexpectedly abrupt note, almost as though there is more still to come. Short on surprises or technical flourishes, Opus will most likely appeal to diehard Sakamoto fans who have already seen the film. But for everyone else, the album is still a poignant and powerful work imbued with ruminations on the passage of time, resilience and, perhaps most profoundly, dignity in the face of death. The album is a testament to Sakamoto's fundamental optimism and dedication to the artistic process right up until his final moments.
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