From an audience clutching stuffed toys and mascots of characters from Studio Ghibli anime films to ushers patiently explaining the protocols of attending a symphonic concert, this postlude to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra season was an altogether extraordinary affair.
The majority of those attending were visibly younger than the average for any other TSO concert, and they were clearly there for one thing: Joe Hisaishi’s evocative tunes for the Academy Award-winning 2001 animated feature, Spirited Away. This epoch-making movie has already been hailed as not only a masterpiece of its genre but also one of the highlights of 21st-century cinema, period. It is the story of a young girl (Chihiro) whose family moves to a new neighbourhood, only to be engulfed by a fantastical universe of spirits, mainly grotesque. Her mission to save her parents, who have been turned into pigs due to their greed, propels her on an allegorical journey beyond life, reality and identity, teaching her and us about courage, determination and friendship. The various episodes are set against a musical canvas that moves from a wistful piano opening (to an audible gasp of excited anticipation on this occasion) to eerie gongs depicting the character of No-Face (an impressionable wandering spirit), the dreamy melancholy of a train journey to the "Sixth Stop", and a high-spirited journey back toward life.
Although the music is highly evocative of the imagery and drama of the story, curiously it works better as a self-standing symphonic suite than when heard on the rather muffled soundtrack to the film itself. As is his custom now, Hisaishi took the solo piano part, moving to the podium to direct the fully orchestral sections. The whole was a treat for the imagination, the more so for not adding visual clues, either in the programme note or on a screen.
In arranging Spirited Away for concert performance, Hisaishi has created smooth transitions and a thematic design that neatly holds the music together. The same cannot be said of about his Symphony no. 3, subtitled "Metaphysica", which opened the concert. Composed in 2021, this three-movement work has Mahlerian pretensions – including the idea for it to be paired with Mahler’s First Symphony, with which it shares large-scale instrumentation and philosophical ambitions. But in practice it remains a typical post-minimalist affair: stylistically eclectic, at times rhythmically entertaining, but at others harmonically, metrically and structurally understimulating.
The first movement, Existence, combines flashy energy with interjections of jazzy episodes and a contrasting long melody in strings. In its episodic nature and lack of thematic backbone, it belies the work’s title, and it all comes to a halt rather than a resolution. The second movement starts with a lamenting lyrical melody in strings, punctuated by woodwinds then brass. The finale, according to the composer, is inspired by Sudoku, in that it is based on spatial and temporal rearranging of six notes. The orchestra’s concentration as they negotiated the intricacies of Hisaishi’s cross-rhythmical writing was superb, but the audience response was understandably lukewarm.
The artistic highlight of the concert was a high-spirited, edgy performance of Ravel’s La Valse, in which Hisaishi brought out the undertones of devastation and haunting drama, without traducing its surface lightness and energy. Even so, far more enthusiastically greeted was Hisaishi’s own waltz Merry-Go-Round of Life from his other studio Ghibli collaboration, Howl’s Moving Castle, which he played as an encore to roaring acclaim.
