Interview: Joe Hisaishi, who wrote music for Hayao Miyazaki's films

It is apt, given the location, that Joe Hisaishi wants to talk about the universal language shared by music and cinema. “This language is shared by these two things – and I think it’s unique to these two things,” says the composer.

It’s just an hour or so after the 64-year-old Japanese maestro played a packed Teatro Nuovo in the small northern Italian city of Udine. He conducted the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra, leading its 80-plus members and at times accompanying them on piano as they performed a selection of Hisaishi’s compositions for the films of master Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, including the score for the Oscar-winning Spirited Away (2001). 

For a country that has – like so many others across the globe – taken Hisaishi’s music to heart, it’s a rare treat: it was the first time he had played a concert in Italy and a coup for the city’s Far East Film Festival, which for its past 17 editions has championed Asian cinema in Europe. Many of the films scored by Hisaishi are huge hits in Italy: his performance received a standing ovation from the 1,200-strong audience.

Throughout his visit to Italy, Hisaishi has been received in a manner usually reserved for rock stars. And he believes that the reason his music – made over a career that now spans more than three decades – has travelled so far is because the two languages of music and cinema cross all cultural boundaries.

“This is a rare thing,” he says, surveying Udine’s cobbled streets. But everywhere you go in the world, people share these two things and can relate to them.”