On the seventh and final night of his run at Radio City Music Hall, a 75-year-old Japanese composer was handed a certificate on stage confirming that no classical composer had ever played that building for that many nights in a row. It was the third such certificate he had collected inside a month. The other two were for filling a baseball stadium in Tokyo with an orchestra, and for selling more tickets across a single classical run at the Hollywood Bowl than anyone in that venue’s history.
The music that did all of this was written for animated films. Much of it was written for films about a girl flying a broomstick, a forest god who turns into a walking constellation at night, and an Italian fighter pilot who has been turned into a pig.
Joe Hisaishi was certified by Guinness World Records for three separate live-performance records, announced together in the late summer. The titles are specific enough to be worth stating properly, because the vagueness of “record-breaking” is what makes most of these announcements meaningless. The first is the most tickets sold by a classical composer during a run at Tokyo Dome, at 133,453. The second is the highest-selling single run for classical music at the Hollywood Bowl, at 45,538 tickets across three nights. The third is the longest consecutive run of performances by a classical composer at Radio City Music Hall, at seven nights in a venue that seats about six thousand.
Those are figures that pop acts post. Tokyo Dome is where you go when you have outgrown arenas. Hisaishi went there with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a chorus, a mandolin player and a soprano, and played music from ten Studio Ghibli films across three performances in two days, with tickets running from roughly 57 to 100 dollars. The building is a baseball stadium. It is not remotely designed for an orchestra, and orchestras do not generally attempt it, because the acoustics are a problem that costs money to solve and the risk of having thirty thousand empty seats staring back at you is real.
He sold it out. Three times.
The part that makes this genuinely strange is not the size of the numbers but who they belong to. Hisaishi is not a crossover pop-classical act who was manufactured to fill rooms. He is a working composer who has been doing the same job for over forty years, and for most of that time the assumption outside Japan was that his music was something you encountered at home, on a television, attached to a cartoon, and that it did not have a concert life of its own.
He was born Mamoru Fujisawa in 1950, in Nagano, in the mountains of central Japan. He started violin lessons at four and went to the Kunitachi College of Music to study composition, arriving at the end of the 1960s. His professional name is a joke that stuck: Joe Hisaishi is a Japanese phonetic play on Quincy Jones, which tells you roughly everything about what a young Japanese composition student in the 1970s was actually listening to.
His early work was not soundtrack music at all. He came up through minimalism, the repetitive, pattern-driven style associated with American composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and his first album, released at the start of the 1980s, was a percussion and synthesiser record that has almost nothing in common with the sweeping orchestral writing he is now known for. He also wrote for television anime to pay bills. The mixture of those two things, austere pattern music and functional commercial scoring, is still audible in everything he does. The famous Ghibli themes are built out of very small cells that repeat and turn slightly on each pass, which is a minimalist’s instinct dressed in a romantic orchestra’s clothes.
In 1983 he was recommended to a director who was making his first proper feature. Hayao Miyazaki needed music for a film called Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, an ecological science-fiction story about a young woman in a poisoned world. Hisaishi wrote it. Tucked into the score is a short, unbearably simple vocal piece, a wordless lament sung by a small child. The child was his daughter Mai, who was four years old, and who was not credited.
That was the beginning of a partnership that has run for more than four decades and which people compare, not unreasonably, to Steven Spielberg and John Williams. Hisaishi has scored nearly every film Miyazaki has directed since. My Neighbour Totoro. Kiki’s Delivery Service. Princess Mononoke. Spirited Away. Howl’s Moving Castle. The Wind Rises. And Porco Rosso, which is the flying pig.
Porco Rosso deserves a moment, because it is the most unlikely thing in a catalogue of unlikely things. It began life as a short film commissioned for showing on aeroplanes by an airline, based on a manga Miyazaki had drawn about a seaplane pilot. The runtime kept growing as the storyboards grew, from a short to forty-five minutes to an hour, at which point it had accidentally become a feature and was released in cinemas instead. It is set in 1929 on the Adriatic coast and concerns an Italian veteran fighter ace who has, for reasons the film declines to explain, been turned into a pig. He hunts air pirates for money and is extremely sad about his life.
Hisaishi scored it with a seventy-piece orchestra, and the result is the least cartoonish music imaginable: dusty, nostalgic, full of accordions and slow waltzes, closer to an old European film than to anything animated. It topped the Japanese box office that year and has been quietly adored ever since. And it is a reminder of the thing that makes the whole catalogue unusual, which is that nobody involved was writing down to children. The brief was never “make it cute.” The brief was to write the emotional interior of a scene, and then animate on top of it.
This is also why the concerts work, and why they were always going to work once somebody tried them. The music was written to carry feeling without dialogue, which means it does not need the pictures. Play the main theme from Totoro to six thousand adults in New York and you do not get polite classical applause, you get a noise. Reports from the Radio City run describe exactly that: the moment a recognisable Ghibli theme arrived, the hall erupted, and people had flown in from other states and from Japan for it.
The Radio City programme is also more interesting than a greatest-hits night. Hisaishi gave the entire first half over to his non-Ghibli work, including music written for the director Nobuhiko Obayashi and, more prominently, for Takeshi Kitano. Kitano’s films are violent, deadpan crime pictures, and Hisaishi’s scores for them, including Sonatine, Hana-bi and Brother, are some of the most restrained and desolate music he has written. It is the same composer who wrote a lullaby for a giant forest spirit, and the point of putting it first was presumably to make a roomful of animation fans sit through forty minutes of the other career before getting what they came for. Only in the second half did he turn to Ghibli, conducting the Orchestra of St Luke’s with the MasterVoices choir, playing piano himself, with Miyazaki imagery projected above the stage.
His daughter sang. Forty-something years after she recorded a wordless lament at the age of four, Mai Fujisawa stood on the Radio City stage as a working singer and performed with her father’s orchestra. She has since built her own career, released albums, founded a choir, and sung on film scores and video games that have nothing to do with him. But that particular continuity, the same voice returning to the same music across four decades, is not something you can manufacture for a press release.
The Hollywood Bowl run was a different kind of proof. That is an outdoor amphitheatre in Los Angeles with a capacity of nearly eighteen thousand, and Hisaishi conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic there across three summer nights. The certified figure of 45,538 tickets is the highest-selling single classical run in the venue’s history, in a city whose entire economy is film, in front of an audience that includes the people who make animated films for a living.
It is worth being careful about one thing here. Attendance and ticket figures for concerts come from promoters, and Guinness World Records verifies the claim against the evidence a claimant supplies rather than running an independent audit of the box office. The records are certified, and certified is a real and checkable status, but it is not the same as independently counted. That distinction matters more than usual in an era where everybody’s tour is the biggest tour ever.
The Tokyo Dome figure also deserves an honest footnote. Those performances happened the previous summer, not this one. The three records were certified together and announced together, which compresses them in the retelling, but the stadium shows that produced the largest number were the final dates of a tour that had already finished when the Hollywood Bowl and Radio City runs took place. It does not diminish the achievement. It just means the story is a certification arriving in one month, not three concerts happening in one month.
What has happened around the records is arguably the bigger development. Hisaishi signed to Deutsche Grammophon a few years ago, which is the oldest and most prestigious classical label in the world, and the sort of institution that spent most of the twentieth century deciding what counted as serious music. His first album for them, an orchestral programme of his own film music, went to the top of the classical charts and has since passed two hundred million streams, which is not a classical number. It is barely a mainstream number.
He has now expanded that deal into a multi-year project to record a series of symphonic suites built from the Ghibli scores, treating them as concert works rather than soundtracks. The first of them, drawn from The Boy and the Heron, is recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and arrives this autumn, with him at the piano. Alongside that he holds three simultaneous institutional posts that would be a career apiece for most composers: a residency with the Paris Philharmonie and the Orchestre de Paris, composer in residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and composer in focus with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His touring is scheduled out to 2030.
At 75, in other words, he is busier than he has ever been, and the work is moving in the opposite direction from the usual late-career drift. Most composers of his standing spend their seventies conducting other people’s music and accepting honours. He already has the honours. Japan gave him its Medal of Honour and later the Order of the Rising Sun, and he has won the country’s national film music award seven times. He is not collecting anything he has not already collected.
What he is doing instead is quietly arguing a case. The case is that the music he has written for animated films is concert repertoire, that it deserves to be recorded by the Royal Philharmonic and issued by Deutsche Grammophon and programmed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and that the only reason it was ever treated as something lesser is that it arrived attached to drawings.
For a long time that argument would have been dismissed as special pleading. Film music has always been slightly patronised by the classical world, and animation music doubly so. But it is hard to dismiss a man who has just been certified as having outsold every classical run in the history of the Hollywood Bowl, who has held Radio City for a week, and who filled a baseball stadium three times over.
There is a version of this story where all of that is the ending: a lifetime of underestimated work finally recognised, trophies collected, reputation settled. That is not where it ends, because he has not stopped. The tour dates run for another four years. The recordings are scheduled. The suites are being written. He is still going back into the same catalogue, the one with the flying pig and the soot sprites and the girl on the broomstick, and finding things in it that he has not yet said properly.
The certificates went on a shelf. The work went back on the stand.