Japanese composer, fighting cancer, livestreams what may be final concert
JAPAN’S Ryuichi Sakamoto, known for his electronic music, including the score for The Last Emperor, on Monday (Dec 12) finished streaming a concert that may be his last as he fights stage 4 cancer.
The 70-year-old Academy-award winning composer said in an online message this month that the unorthodox performance, broadcast to more than two dozen nations around the world, came about because he could no longer complete a regular concert.
“My strength has really fallen, so a normal concert of about an hour to 90 minutes would be very difficult,” he said. “As a result, I’ve recorded it song by song and edited it together, so it can be presented as a regular concert – which I believe can be pleasureable in the normal way. Enjoy.”
The concert, which featured a solo on piano for 13 of the songs, included themes from The Last Emperor and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, in which he acted alongside David Bowie in addition to writing the score. It was streamed four times starting at noon on Sunday (Dec 11), with the last coming early on Monday morning in Japan.
First introduced to the piano as a toddler, Sakamoto studied ethnomusicology at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, with particular interest in the traditional music of Japan’s Okinawa prefecture; he also studied Indian and African musical traditions.
The composer, who has named classical musician Claude Debussy as his hero, matured into a keyboard and electronic musician and composer known for film scores, especially Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and Bernard Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, for which he won an Academy Award.
In 2014, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, which was cured after years of treatment. But in January 2021, he said he had been diagnosed with rectal cancer the previous year.
In June 2022, he wrote in an essay that the cancer had spread despite multiple operations and was now in stage 4.
“I have just turned 70, but how many more times will I be able to see the full moon?“ he wrote. “But even thinking that, since I have been granted life, I am praying that I will be able to make music until my last moments, just like my beloved Bach and Debussy.” REUTERS
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