Slowly, very slowly, the lighting softly dims until the Queens Hall is almost completely blanketed in darkness. As this is happening, the sound of trickling water echoes around the old church building, cocooning us within an ambient soundscape. It is as though we are hearing, in infinitesimal detail, Planet Earth actually melting.
To this atmospheric backdrop, Ryuichi Sakamoto wanders onto the low stage, almost absentmindedly, and stops at the large grand piano, seemingly surprised at his discovery. He hunches over the inner workings of the instrument, directly plucking the strings, producing cascading shimmers of resonant notes. It is a beautifully immersive opening ten minutes, a performance of a piece, appropriately entitled “Glacier”, taken from the second disc of Sakamoto’s new CD release, Out Of Noise.
Tonight is the last night of a two-month tour for Sakamoto. For the first half hour, he performs works from Out Of Noise. They are a mixture of acoustic instrumentation with electronic treatments, all produced by Sakamoto himself. There is a sense of textural, ambient drift within this music and an emotional core of ever so slightly troubled serenity. The effect is heightened by effectively moody lighting changes and the abstract images filtering onto the large screen which forms the backdrop to the stage.
The audience is rapt and quietly attentive to this delicately austere music. However, one can’t help feeling they are really here for the solo piano versions of Sakamoto’s film scores and past work which follows. Despite sadly ignoring his early musical career in Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto takes us on a mesmerising tour of his back pages. Pieces from his solo piano album of 2000, Back To The Basic, are interspersed with arrangements of themes written for Sakamoto’s film work with the likes of Pedro Almodovar and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as his most well-known piece of music for the 1982 film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.
The Queens Hall ambience tonight is reverentially hushed, and Sakamoto himself is a calmly mercurial presence. He speaks infrequently to the audience, merely to introduce the next piece. His solo piano work is playful and light, but not without depth, reminiscent of Debussy-like piano miniatures. At the end of every rendition, his hands gesticulate flutter-like above the keyboard before settling gently down once more. It is the physical representation of taking a long, soothing breath and being still once more. A beautiful and transfixing evening.