Bang on a Can All-Stars in RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, 1996 Will Come to The Wallis

Sakamoto was a composer of breathtaking range—an artist who scored the emotions of entire generations. From the Oscar-winning grandeur of The Last Emperor to the aching intimacy of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, his music was both deeply personal and profoundly cinematic.
 
This is a celebration of legacy—a chance to experience Sakamoto's music as it was never heard before: raw, intimate, and alive. With each movement, the All-Stars honor a visionary who composed without boundaries and dreamed in sound. They don't just perform Sakamoto's music. They invite us into his world.
 
Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023) was arguably the best-known and most successful Japanese musician in the world. Even a casual glance through his portfolio satisfies the question of his iconic status in contemporary music, popular music and film com-position. His Oscar for the soundtrack to Bernardo Bertolucci's, The Last Emperor is certainly the most obvious laurel among a collection of several Golden Globes and Grammys for other films.  His score for the 1992 Olympic Games opening ceremony in Barcelona was viewed by over a billion people around the world. Westerners gravitated to his unique style and aesthetic, thus his association with luminaries of the music world such as Thomas Dolby, Brian Wilson and Laurie Anderson. 
 
The musicians of Bang on a Can All-Stars have long adored Sakamoto's work and in the 1996 project, they carefully transcribe and recreate the same-named original recording for live performance, much of it for the first time, as they did previously with Brian Eno's Music for Airports. The album 1996 includes an incredible selection of tracks, many of Sakamoto's most well-known.  Bang on a Can All-Stars playing 1996 is an exploration, a tribute and a celebration of one of the most influential contemporary musicians of his time
 
Sakamoto's film scores are renowned for their diversity and sensitivity, it is rare for a band to play this music live. and now the Bang on a Can All-Stars realize their own new live arrangements of the album 1996 (arranged by the All-Stars' multi-talented clarinetist-composer Ken Thomson) — which includes an incredible selection of many of Sakamoto's greatest hits – music from films including The Last Emperor, Wuthering Heights, The Sheltering Sky, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and more.
 
Ryuichi Sakamoto has lived many musical lives in his nearly 70 years. As a keyboardist and songwriter in Haruomi Hosono's Yellow Magic Orchestra, he helped set the stage for synthpop. His solo experiments in fusing global genres and close studies of classical impressionism led to him scoring over 30 films in as many years, including Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, and Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant.
 
In the past 20 years alone, he's wrote a multimedia opera, turned a glass building into an instrument, and travelled to the Arctic to record the sound of melting snow. That exploratory spirit runs through Sakamoto's 2017 album, async, which paints an audio portrait of the passing of time informed by his recovery from throat cancer.  “Music, work, and life all have a beginning and an ending,” said Sakamoto in early 2019. “What I want to make now is music freed from the constraints of time.”