Live Streaming Event: Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus

In the fall of 2022, just half a year before he passed away, Sakamoto spent a week in a vast room in the NHK Broadcasting Center in Tokyo alone with a Yamaha grand piano, Sora, and Sora’s modest crew. He played twenty selections from his long and storied career, ranging from his early days as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, the ’80s-era electropop sensation, through his film scores (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Last Emperor) to his later, often more experimental works.

“Reconfiguring some of the compositions, a few of which he’d never before performed publicly on solo piano,” writes Sheri Linden in the Hollywood Reporter, “Sakamoto travels through a varied musical terrain: quiet passages, melodic lyricism, bursts of thunderous churning.” Sakamoto “is not just revisiting his compositions but rediscovering them. Searching, communion, and occasional delight play upon his face; he’s still creating, still profoundly invested in the work.”

“I can’t recall a concert film as ascetically committed to documenting little more than the intimate dynamic between a musician and their instrument,” writes Nick Kouhi at In Review Online. Opus’s “dialectical illustration of Sora’s and Sakamoto’s respective mediums remains a tremendously moving testament to making art as a form of expressing love.” Following the premiere in Venice last fall and screenings at festivals in New York, London, and Tokyo, Opus opened in March and became a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Alissa Wilkinson called it “a gift from a master” and “an intensely moving experience.”