Japanese composer Ryoichi Sakamoto (1952) died on 28 March in his native Tokyo. With his Yellow Magic Orchestra, founded in 1977, he was at the cradle of technopop. His solo experiments in mixing musical genres from around the world and thorough studies of classical impressionism led him to compose the music for nearly 40 films, including Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983) and Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant (2015). Sakamoto achieved his greatest success with his music for The Last Emperor in 1987, for which he won an Oscar, a Grammy and a Golden Globe. In 2014, Sakamoto was diagnosed with throat cancer. He seemed to be cured, until the disease returned in another variant in 2020.
Associate artist Holland Festival
In 2021, Sakamoto, together with French-Austrian theatre maker Gisèle Vienne, was the Holland Festival's associate artist. Programme manager music and music theatre Jochem Valkenburg: "Ryuichi was the dream associate artist for us: a creator of the outer category who, always looking for new sounds and experiences, not only constantly reinvented himself, but was also always very curious and generous towards other creators. He brought us the breathtaking performance TIME, in which he almost seemed to stop time, but also introduced artists like Daito Manabe, Kukangendai and Yuko Mohri. He also happily gave young musician Alexandre Kordzaia the green light for a reinterpretation of early Sakamoto hits. Unfortunately, he was already unable to attend the festival himself due to his illness."
TIME went into world premiere during the festival's 2021 edition. This opera, which Sakamoto created together with director and visual artist Shiro Takatani, asks questions about the phenomenon of time and the relationship between man and nature. Sakamoto: 'We live and we die. And after we die, our body becomes part of the next being. This is samsara itself, the life circle of life on earth.'