Three Film Scores

Program notes

About the Work

Hikaru Hayashi was one of the most prolific and versatile Japanese composers of the twentieth century, and one of the most important figures in the history of Japanese film music. Over a career of more than half a century he wrote the scores for well over a hundred films, alongside symphonies, more than thirty operas, choral works and a large body of songs, and he moved between the concert hall, the theatre and the cinema without ever treating one as less serious than the others. His inclusion in this anniversary concert at Suntory Hall, with the Vienna Philharmonic and Riccardo Muti, brings a distinctly Japanese voice into an otherwise all-Viennese programme of Beethoven and Mozart.

Hayashi’s film career began in the mid-1950s and was defined above all by one long partnership. From the 1959 film Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Daigo Fukuryū Maru), about the Japanese fishing boat caught in the fallout of an American hydrogen-bomb test, until the director’s final film, Postcard (Ichimai no hagaki, 2011), Hayashi scored a long run of films by Kaneto Shindō. Their collaboration produced some of the landmarks of Japanese cinema. The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960) follows a farming family on a tiny island in the Seto Inland Sea as they carry water, day after day, up a barren hillside; it has almost no dialogue, and Hayashi’s music, built on a simple, haunting theme, does much of the work that words would normally do. The film won the top prize at the Moscow International Film Festival and made both men internationally known. Hayashi went on to write the music for Shindō’s darker, stylised period dramas Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), both of them tales of the supernatural set among the wars of medieval Japan.

He also worked with Nagisa Ōshima, the leading figure of the Japanese New Wave, on films including Band of Ninja (1967) and Death by Hanging (1968), and with many other directors, as well as writing extensively for television. Across this wide output his film writing is marked by economy: rather than lush, continuous underscoring in the Hollywood manner, he tended to favour a few clear, memorable ideas, carefully placed, that could carry the emotional weight of a whole film.

At the time of writing, the organisers have not announced which three film scores make up this set, nor details of the arrangement being played, so it is best approached with open ears rather than a fixed expectation. What can be said is that Hayashi’s film music grew from the same roots as his concert works: a strong gift for melody, a deep attachment to Japanese song and the rhythms of the Japanese language, and a conviction, inherited from his teacher Hisatada Otaka and shared with his friends in the ‘Goat Society’ (Yagi no Kai), that music should speak directly to ordinary listeners. He founded that group in 1953 with Yūzō Toyama and Michio Mamiya.

What to Listen For

Since the exact selection has not been published, listen above all for the qualities that run through Hayashi’s work for the screen. The first is melody. Hayashi was a songwriter at heart, and his best film themes are simple, singable tunes, often in a gently modal idiom that recalls Japanese folk song without quoting it directly. Notice how a single melody can be restated with small changes of colour (a solo woodwind, then strings, then the full orchestra) so that it seems to grow more poignant with each return. This is how film music works on an audience in the cinema, and heard in the concert hall it takes on the character of a series of short, lyrical tone poems.

Listen, too, for the economy of the writing. Hayashi rarely fills every bar. He often lets a theme sit over a sparse, repeated accompaniment, or leaves space and silence around it, trusting the listener’s imagination to supply the images. If one of the pieces comes from The Naked Island, you may hear a slow, patient, circling tune, suggesting the endless rhythm of labour on the island; if from Shindō’s supernatural dramas, expect starker, more percussive textures and a sense of menace.

Finally, listen for the meeting of worlds that this performance represents. The Vienna Philharmonic’s sound, with its warm, rounded Viennese horns and oboes and its singing strings, is the sound of Mozart and Beethoven. Hearing it applied to music written for Japanese films, in the hall that hosts the orchestra’s regular visits to Tokyo, is part of the point of this celebratory evening.