At Suntory Hall, Tokyo, Joe Hisaishi sets a seismograph under the century’s anxieties and invites it to write in real time. This live document—part of his Future Orchestra Classics series and now on Deutsche Grammophon—pairs the Japanese premiere of Steve Reich’s The Desert Music with Hisaishi’s own The End of the World. It’s a bold curatorial gambit and a revealing self-portrait: Hisaishi the bridge-builder, placing his expansive, cinematic lyricism in charged dialogue with Reich’s adamantine pulse. The result is a program that measures how dread, memory and hope sound when filtered through an orchestra of young, hungry players and a chorus that understands the power of massed breath.
Reich’s piece arrives first, and with it the sensation of a city grid lighting up at dusk. The Future Orchestra Classics, founded by Hisaishi to bring modern orchestral repertoire to new listeners, plays with crisp unanimity and an almost dancerly sense of weight. In the opening “fast,” mallet percussion and strings rally into a gleaming, interlocking engine; Hisaishi favors a buoyant buoyancy over brute insistence, letting harmonies bloom at the edges rather than drilling straight through the center. The succeeding “moderate” and “slow” sections ebb into warmer air, the Philharmonic Chorus of Tokyo layering chordal planes that feel less like commentary and more like the architecture that holds the city up. You can hear the trade Hisaishi makes with Reich’s asceticism: he doesn’t sand it down, exactly, but he draws attention to its shimmer rather than its serration.
The central triptych—IIIA, IIIB, IIIC—benefits from this lighting. Where some readings sharpen the piece into a scolding monument, Hisaishi frames it as a living organism. The young players relish the hocketing figures; inner voices surface, then recede, like neon flickers beneath rain. If one occasionally misses the acidic bite that can make Reich feel truly dangerous, the compensation is clarity of texture and a humane sense of proportion. By the time we reach the closing “fast,” the work’s restless circuitry has accumulated enough voltage to glow without glare. The chorus, never strident, lends a communal steadiness to the final ascent. It sounds less like a warning flare than a collectively held question.
Hisaishi’s The End of the World answers in another dialect. Written in the long shadow of September 2001, its four-movement arc—“Collapse,” “Grace of the St. Paul,” “D.e.a.d,” “Beyond the World”—treats catastrophe not as spectacle but as a spiritual weather system. The opening is all fracture and aftershock, rhythm splintering across the orchestra in patterns that hint at minimalism while refusing to submit to gridlock. Hisaishi’s sense of drama, so beloved in his film work, is here disciplined rather than indulgent; he builds tension by withholding the big release and by trusting the orchestra’s attack. When it comes, the power is structural, not merely loud.
“Grace of the St. Paul” pivots from rubble to ritual. Harmonies sit close enough to feel like prayer. There is a luminous stillness here that avoids the easy sugar of elegy. Hisaishi refuses to sentimentalize; he writes with the long memory of someone who has scored grief before and knows it’s mostly silence and small increments of light.
“D.e.a.d” marches forward with ritualistic tread, the percussion writing dry and unsentimental, the harmony harmonically shadowed rather than noir. This is where the album’s guest soloist, soprano Ella Taylor, becomes central to Hisaishi’s dramaturgy. Taylor’s tone is clean but not brittle, projecting an almost chastening clarity in the upper register that pierces the orchestral fabric without tearing it. Hisaishi writes for the voice as if it were a compass needle—restless, searching, finally settling on true north only when the orchestra remembers to breathe. In “Beyond the World,” that breath widens. Lines lift and open, and Hisaishi, so often identified with melody that refuses to leave the ear, crafts one that is generous without being obvious. The movement doesn’t resolve trauma; it acknowledges the possibility of walking with it.
The closing “Recomposed by Joe Hisaishi: The End of the World” functions as a reflective coda, the composer looking back at his material from a slightly different angle. It compresses the suite’s emotional itinerary into a single arc and, in doing so, reveals Hisaishi’s conductor-curator mindset: themes are not fixed monuments but living tools to be refitted for new contexts. Some will prefer the sprawl and dramaturgy of the four-movement original; others may find this recomposition the place where the piece’s architecture snaps most cleanly into focus.
What makes the album more than a pairing of convenience is the way Hisaishi treats Reich not as museum object but as a contemporary with whom to argue in public. The Desert Music, in his hands, becomes less about the terror of systems and more about the people who have to live inside them. The End of the World, heard in that light, reads as an act of repair, not just remembrance. And the Future Orchestra Classics—lean, vivid, unafraid of attack—sound like the ensemble he needed to make that case. Their youth is not a marketing hook; it’s an interpretive asset, audible in the refusal to coast and the confidence to play softly without losing intensity.
If the FOC project began by re-voicing the canon, this seventh volume asserts something more consequential: Hisaishi as a public intellectual of orchestral music, capable of assembling programs that change how audiences listen. The live recording preserves the heat of that argument—chorus and strings moving air in a hall built for resonance—and the 180-gram vinyl release promises a tactile permanence to a night built on transient breath. As a document, it captures a conductor-composer at the height of his persuasive powers, bringing two visions of modern fear and fragile hope into sharp relief. As a statement of intent, it suggests Hisaishi’s next role will be not only to write memorable themes, but to shape the rooms in which the future of orchestral music is decided.
