It was a belated reminder that, when Sakamoto blends the melodic with the experimental, he can be quietly magnificent. He encored with a triptych of compositions that invoked, variously, Michael Nyman, Keith Jarrett and Morton Feldman. He reprised his themes to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and The Last Emperor, and a curious piano-duelling version of Behind the Mask (the Yellow Magic Orchestra instrumental famously sampled by Eric Clapton). Elsewhere, romantic classical pastiches, such as Amore, are presumably meant to sound like Erik Satie, but lacking harmonic depth, the effect is more of an incomplete backing track to a Lionel Richie ballad.īut just as the audience were getting bored, Sakamoto won them over with some old favourites. The jazzier pieces, such as A Flower Is Not a Flower, resemble Bill Evans's more spartan solos, but Sakamoto lacks the fearsome jazz chops that Evans kept in reserve. The next half-hour sees Sakamoto play from his more orthodox – and more underwhelming – album Playing the Piano. Sakamoto hunches over the piano, plucking its strings and caressing the keys until the instrument becomes as alien and exotic as his field recordings of rain forests and melting glaciers. We start with material from his experimental album Out of Noise, in which he is accompanied, variously, by out-of-sync pianos, a reverbed Fender Rhodes, sampled strings and eerie sounds from nature. Ryuichi Sakamoto + Follow Artist As one-third of Yellow Magic Orchestra and an Academy Award-winning composer for his work on the soundtrack for 1987s The Last Emperor, synth pop innovator Ryuichi Sakamoto is among the most groundbreaking artists to have emerged since the late 70s. The shows are billed as piano 'solos', but most of these tracks are virtual duets, with Sakamoto playing along to his own backing tracks (an unused concert grand sits opposite him, symbolically). S ynth-pop pioneer, Oscar-winning soundtrack king, bossa nova obsessive, opera composer and pioneer of a futuristic take on world music dubbed 'neo geo', Ryuichi Sakamoto has also found time in the last three decades to record several albums of piano music, which provide the basis for this tour.

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