Sol Levante

Certainly! Here is the Italian text translated into English:

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The exclusive and extraordinary event, with entry by reservation only, is scheduled for Saturday, February 8, 2025, at 9:00 PM in the welcoming and elegant venue of A Stare, located at via Geremia di Scanno 32 in Barletta. For info and reservations, call 3534512809. A special thanks goes to the sponsors whose collaboration allows us to maintain a high level of programming. For this solo piano series, our thanks go to CUMIRA VIAGGI BARLETTA.

Sol Levante

SAKAMOTO

- Departure
- Lost theme - Femme Fatale
- Bibo no Aozora
- Love
- Bring Theme home
- Song
- Lost theme - Femme Fatale
- Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

HISAISHI

- Innocent
- Nostalgia
- Hana-Bi
- One summer’s day
- Ballad
- Nocturne
- Howl's Moving Castle Theme

Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of the great pioneers of blending traditional Oriental music with Western electronic avant-garde. Few have managed to span different genres without losing their artistic compass like he did, from ethnic to classical. His creative strength, devoid of compromises, has never ridden the intellectual impulses of his contemporaries, preserving originality and coherence without becoming a cliché. This is all synthesized in a long series of remarkable melodies that have become familiar because they belonged to our imagination and lay in wait for someone to play them, his music sometimes grazes superficiality and inconsistency but only because this was part of the project itself. The central focus of his work remains the concept (assimilated from Wayne Shorter) of creating Duty Free Music, in other words, music free from obligations.

He is famous for having composed the music for Nagisa Oshima's film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, in which Sakamoto also stars alongside David Bowie. A soundtrack created in collaboration with David Sylvian from Japan and enriched with the splendid single "Forbidden Colours".

Over the years, Sakamoto has specialized in film scores. The one for Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor earned him an Oscar, but others such as The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha (also for Bertolucci) are worth remembering.

Joe Hisaishi was born in Japan, Nagano, in 1950. He discovered his passion for music at the age of five when he began his first violin lessons. In 1969, he enrolled in the Kunitachi College of Music, graduating in composition. From that moment on, his brilliant career as a world-renowned star officially began. After collaborating with minimalist artists as a typographic composer, in the early seventies he wrote the music for a small animated cartoon called Gyatoruzu, and for the anime series Sasuga no Sarutobi and Futari Taka. Hisaishi's compositions are influenced by J-pop (Japanese popular music), electronic music (especially thanks to the Yellow Magic Orchestra), and new age, musical genres that spread in Japan in the '70s. Over the years, Hisaishi has created a truly unmistakable style, experimenting with different musical genres.

Compared to Ryuichi Sakamoto, Hisaishi's compositions and performances are more classical, romantic, melancholic, and technical (in piano performances). In Hisaishi's compositions, there is music with a Spanish, Italian, or Latin flavor that is melancholic and pathetic.

Today, Hisaishi is the composer who is increasingly emerging on the music scenes related to cinema, as Sakamoto was at the end of the '80s, right after the release of the extraordinary film by Nagisa Oshima: "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" (inexplicably translated as Furyo). The beauty of the melodies, the orchestration skill, the mastery in the art of variation, the pronounced "theatrical sense" inherent in the composer's musical choices, the will to unite oriental arrangements with Western-style melodies, and vice versa.

Compared to an electronic artist like Sakamoto, Joe prefers the grand piano, supported by romantic-style orchestras, often skewed towards the string sections for the compositions of Japanese anime and manga.

Ryūichi Sakamoto:
Lost Theme (Love Theme) from the film “Femme Fatale” Femme Fatale is a 2002 film written and directed by Brian De Palma, starring Rebecca Romijn and Antonio Banderas, presented out of competition at the 55th Cannes Film Festival.

“Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” from the Film Furyo

A year ago we lost Ryūichi Sakamoto, the Japanese musician "born" as a member of the electronic band Yellow Magic Orchestra who became a composer of soundtracks for some of the most important contemporary directors in the '80s (such as Bertolucci, Almodóvar, Iñárritu, and De Palma). Throughout his career, both in solo compositions and film scores, Sakamoto mixed eastern musical sounds with those of the West, striving to use new, dissonant, and never-before-explored sounds (the documentary about his creative process by Stephen Schible is very interesting, Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA).

On the first anniversary of his death, we will dedicate ourselves to the film that marked the beginning of his career as a film composer, a film where Sakamoto was both a composer and an actor. We refer to Furyo (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Nagisa Ōshima, 1983), a peculiar war movie that, leaving aside the grand epic schemes of military and political scenarios, focuses on a more contained conflict that appropriately requires a "reduced battlefield."

The Sheltering Sky from the film The Sheltering Sky These soundtracks flirt with the listener's memory spaces, without pushing the emotional tone too far, the romance transforms into carnality and contemplation.

Joe Hisaishi

“HANA-BI” is the theme of the film “HANA-BI” directed by Kitano. It is also Hisaishi's iconic ballad with a melancholic flavor.

“Ballade” is a piece for the film “Brother” directed by Kitano. A song with an iconic flavor of Hisaishi, melancholic, painful, and grand. This song is not a ballad, but it evoked passionate love like a ballad song.

“Merry go round of life” is an Italian-flavored song, the soundtrack of “Howl's Moving Castle.”

The Japanese government has honored composer Joe Hisaishi, known to us fans for the soundtracks of animated films produced by Studio Ghibli and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata with the Order of the Rising Sun. Established in 1875 by Emperor Meiji, the Order of the Rising Sun is a prestigious honor awarded to those who have achieved significant accomplishments in various fields. The modern version of this honor has also been awarded to non-Japanese people since 1981.