Why This Blog Exists
If you have attended one of Joe Hisaishi’s concerts in Europe over the past few years, you already know something is happening. The venues are getting bigger. The audiences are getting louder. And the programmes, depending on which evening you chose, may have surprised you in ways you did not expect.
Two Kinds of Concert, One Composer
Since 2022, Hisaishi has given around thirty concerts across Europe — among them the large-scale Studio Ghibli film concerts, such as the two sold-out nights at La Défense Arena in Paris in April 2024, and evenings focused entirely on his symphonic and contemporary classical work, such as his appearance at the BBC Proms in London in August 2025. Concerts of the latter kind have accounted for roughly six dates since the pandemic. Both formats have drawn substantial audiences, and both are equally his.
It is also worth noting that the boundary between these two worlds is not always a clean one. A number of European concerts have placed both within a single evening — pairing the Symphony No. 2 with the Princess Mononoke symphonic suite, as happened in Paris and Strasbourg in May 2022. This mixed-programme format has been a recurring feature of Hisaishi’s work in Japan too, most notably during the second phase of his World Dream Orchestra project, where Ghibli suites shared programmes with his own new works, carefully chosen classical repertoire — Debussy, Ravel, and others — and minimalist music, among other things. For many listeners, those evenings have been the most revealing of all — making the connections between his two musical worlds impossible to ignore.
For anyone who arrived at one of those purely classical evenings having fallen in love with the Ghibli music, the experience may have been disorienting. Some may even have left feeling a little short-changed. That reaction is entirely understandable, and it points to something worth examining more closely.
A Composer Who Has Always Had Two Lives
What is easy to miss, particularly from outside Japan, is that the divide between these two kinds of concert is not new, and it is not accidental. Hisaishi has been operating in parallel worlds for most of his career. Long before Nausicaä brought his name to a generation of Japanese children in 1984, he had been working as a composer of minimalist music — writing in a tradition shaped by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley, whose influence he has spoken about directly in interviews and in his own writing. His early albums MKWAJU (1981) and Information (1982) predate the Ghibli partnership entirely, and they sound like nothing from those films.
This dual identity has shaped everything he has done since. His concert series Music Future, which has been running in Japan since 2014, is dedicated entirely to contemporary classical music — programming Reich, Arvo Pärt, Nico Muhly, and his own chamber works alongside each other. His orchestral series Future Orchestra Classics places him beside Brahms and Schubert as conductor, not as film composer. In 2021, he premiered his Symphony No. 2 — a work written not as an extension of his film music, but as a piece of concert music in its own right. These are the choices of a composer who takes his place in the concert music tradition seriously — and who has earned that place through decades of work that most of his international audience has never encountered.
Why It Takes Some Knowing
None of this is secret information. But it is information that requires some seeking out, and in languages and sources that are not always accessible to a European audience.
Even in Japan, a full understanding of Hisaishi’s artistic trajectory tends to be the territory of long-standing fans — those who have followed his interviews, read his books, and attended both kinds of concert over many years.
That said, it is worth saying clearly: you do not need to understand any of this to have a profound experience at one of his classical concerts. The audiences at Vienna and Helsinki and London have not been full of musicologists. They have been full of people who were moved — sometimes deeply — by what they heard, even without a map. The music is not inaccessible. It is serious and ambitious, but it is also, in Hisaishi’s own words, music that he wants to reach people directly, without mediation. That instinct — the melodist’s instinct — runs through everything he writes, whether the venue is a Ghibli arena show or the BBC Proms.
What This Blog Is For
The essays published here under the Features category are an attempt to make some of that background available in English, for readers who are encountering Hisaishi’s work from Europe and want to go deeper. They draw on primary sources — his books, concert booklets, interviews, album liner notes — to explore specific moments, albums, and ideas in his career. They are written by someone who has spent a long time with this music and cares about it, not by an algorithm, and they try to hold the two sides of Hisaishi’s output together rather than treating them as separate subjects.
You do not need to know MKWAJU to love The Path of the Wind. The aim here is simply to offer a little more of the story — so that the next concert you attend, whatever kind it turns out to be, arrives with a little more context behind it.
A composer who can fill La Défense Arena and the BBC Proms in the same year, with entirely different audiences and entirely different music, is not easily explained in a single evening’s programme note. The essays here try to draw some lines between those worlds — and see what connects them.