Ryūichi Sakamoto - Opus
By Kit Macdonald
Over a week in September 2022, in the full knowledge that he would die of cancer within weeks, Ryūichi Sakamoto sat down to make the recordings that would comprise Opus: a parting gift from a genius. Opus is almost entirely wordless and consists of Sakamoto in his favourite studio, playing 20 of his greatest tracks, alone at his piano with only a film crew for an audience. That crew included his son, Neo Sora, the director of this film, and a deep well of emotion unsurprisingly suffuses the film, despite Sakamoto himself appearing to be lost in the joy of playing for the majority of it.
The songs he plays in Opus span his magnificent career, from soundtracks for The Sheltering Sky and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, to seminal electronic music recorded with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi in the 1970s as Yellow Magic Orchestra from the 1970s, to his collaborations with the German musician Alva Noto.