French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously apologized for writing a long letter, explaining that he did not have enough time to write a short one. The multi-talented composer and maestro Joe Hisaishi would not need to make such an apology. The May 28 TSO program that he curated, and the scores he composes, exude beauty through simplicity. The evening featured three composers, three works, one governing idea: to demonstrate the beauty of simplicity. It is an attractive force that cuts across cultures and centuries.
Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall was well sold out in advance. From the main floor to the choir loft, the magic held the attention of multiple generations: senior subscribers seated beside elementary school students, and likely more than a few concertgoers who had never attended a symphony before but may well have known every note of a Hisaishi film score by heart. The demographics mapped devotees of the Bach cello suites to video game fans, from seasoned TSO fans to people for whom the concert was likely a first encounter with classical music.
Each of the selected works coupled technical complexity with deceptive simplicity of repetition. The British cellist Steven Isserlis famously teaches, “thou shalt not bore.” That commandment was adhered to here by composers and performers alike. Short fragments, simple melodic patterns that return each time with a twist. In lesser hands this is the surest road to tedium. On this night, to the contrary, familiarity brought freshness.
The concert opened with Three Movements composed by Steve Reich in 1986. Born in New York in 1936, Reich’s musical language is informed by his study of West African drumming in Ghana, Balinese gamelan and Hebrew cantillation. Three Movements was a good choice to open the evening with its strong rhythmic engines and novel instrumental combinations. With fine playing by the woodwinds, strings, percussion sections, the music’s tonality made it easily accessible.
Photo: Allan Cabral/Courtesy of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Hisaishi’s Viola Saga for Orchestra (2023) followed, with violist Antoine Tamestit as soloist, making his TSO debut. Viola Saga is a meditation on lyricism in two movements, consisting of 19 minutes of sustained melodic force that is characterized by recurrence. The dialogue between Tamestit and the TSO highlighted the phenomenally challenging scoring.
As an encore, Tamestit played the Prelude from Bach’s first cello suite with its rolling arpeggios shifting harmonically with a driving pulse. A French violist selects as an encore a work composed three centuries before, written by a German composer for a different instrument, in a Canadian hall after an evening of Japanese minimalism and American post-modernism. Music does not need a passport to cross time or space.
The concert’s second half featured Hisaishi’s Concerto for Orchestra, a five-movement, approximately 45 minute work. Apparently, many of the attendees flew in from out of town for this Canadian premiere of the TSO co-commission composed in 2026. And for good reason! The composer—and the evening’s maestro—was born Mamoru Fujisawa in Nagano, Japan in 1950. He is best known for his Miyazaki film scores, one of the great creative partnerships of modern culture. His Concerto for Orchestra, co-commissioned by eight orchestras across three continents, revealed his ability to bring “classical music” to fans of all musical genres. Multiple keyboards anchor its harmonic architecture, their interlocking voices lending lighter passages an almost enchanted quality. The experience is not unlike the fanciful, weightless feeling of ambling through the Magic Kingdom; wonder built not from grandeur but from the precise calibration of small delights. Yet the full orchestral palette is commanded across all five movements: driving rhythmic intensity giving way to passages of the most delicate transparency; brass of power and precision; woodwinds darting through intricate figures; strings shifting between urgency and lyrical ease.
When the final note settled, the ovations were immediate, sustained, and Hisaishi and the TSO had not just sold out a concert. They had captured the common frequency. Judging from the applause which followed each segment of the concert, one can safely bet on a follow-up program title, Hisaishi WILL Return.
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