Brussels Philharmonic conducted by Dirk Brossé – Ryuichi Sakamoto Music for Film

The Romaeuropa Festival celebrates the great Maestro Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of the most significant and important artists on the contemporary musical scene, just over a year after his death, with a series of events at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, which link the inaugural week of the festival to the final one.

The first of the events has as its theme the film music that made the composer famous throughout the world; ranging from The Last Emperor to Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and many others. Published for the first time in 2022 thanks to the collaboration between the Ghent Film Festival and the Evolution Music label, Music For Film presents the first overview of this vast corpus of soundtracks collected by the Brussels Philharmonic with the direction of Dirk Brossé, composer, conductor and musical director of the Ghent Film Festival itself. This is a performance that aims to retrace this broad musical repertoire, an example of the poetics of one of the greatest artists of our time.

One of the initiators of electronic music, composer and pianist, Sakamoto composed his first soundtrack in 1983, called by director Nagisa Oshima for Furyo (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence) in which he also participated as an actor together with David Bowie. From that point on, Sakamoto continued to work with some of the world's most important directors, including Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor, Tea in the Desert, Little Buddha), Brian De Palma (Snake Eyes, Femme Fatale), Pedro Almadovar (Spike Heels) and more recently Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, The Revenant), writing some of the most important pages of musical culture in the contemporary repertoire.

Program:
The Last Emperor: Endroll (8:02)
Yae No Sakura: Opening Theme (3:02)
Snake Eyes: Theme (5:26)
The Sheltering Sky: Main Theme (6:26)
High Heels (Tacones Lejanos): Main Theme (3:08)
Little Buddha: Acceptance (8:49)
Babel: Bibo No Aozora (6:28)
The Last Emperor: Rain (4:16)
Wild Palms: Main Theme (2:31)
Femme Fatale: Bolerisch (6:11)
Hara-Kiri (Ichimei): Small Hope (5:00)
The Revenant: Main Theme (3:07)
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence: Main Theme (6:02)

Photo credits: courtesy of the Auditorium Parco della Musica