The grainy burr of recorded viols gave “Still Life” an air of melancholy. Sakamoto offered four further selections from that album. Sakamoto reached into one of the two grand pianos on the stage, plucking and scraping the strings as hazy video images shifted and wobbled on a screen overhead.Īrched low over the keyboard, with curtains of white hair framing his still-boyish face, Mr. Slipping on in nearly complete darkness, Mr.
Sakamoto opened his concert with music from “Out of Noise,” the desolate electro-acoustic rumble of “Glacier” emanating from loudspeakers even before he took the stage. Much of the material came from his new Decca album, a repackaging of two of his recent discs: “Playing the Piano,” a collection of solo reveries, and “Out of Noise,” a grittier project involving dissonance, environmental ambience and contributions from other performers, including the English viol consort Fretwork and the Austrian electronic musician Christian Fennesz. Sakamoto’s concert, part of an eco-friendly American tour. Apart from being a skillful keyboardist, he is a pop-culture hero in his native Japan, a composer of film scores and symphonic works, a record producer and entrepreneur, an actor and, most recently, an environmental activist.Įlements from all those roles surfaced in one way or another during Mr. Sakamoto, 58, is a figure whose renown encompasses a plethora of disparate activities. Can a concert be too beautiful for comfort? The question seemed pertinent for a long stretch of a rare local performance by Ryuichi Sakamoto in the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University on Monday night.
0 kommentar(er)
