Joe Hisaishi

From Nagano to a name borrowed from Quincy Jones

Joe Hisaishi was born Mamoru Fujisawa on 6 December 1950 in Nakano, in Japan's Nagano prefecture. He entered Kunitachi College of Music in 1969 to study composition, and by 1974 was writing for anime series. His first major solo album came in 1981. The stage name arrived around the same time and was a deliberate homage: the kanji chosen for Hisaishi can be read in a way that echoes how Quincy Jones's first name renders in Japanese.

The partnership that defined his working life began with Hayao Miyazaki in the early 1980s, with the score for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1984 as the first film. From then on Hisaishi scored all but one of Miyazaki's features, a run that includes My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo, The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron. The relationship is routinely compared to that of Steven Spielberg and John Williams, and for good reason: the director's images and the composer's themes are now inseparable for several generations of viewers.

Away from Studio Ghibli he built a second body of film work with the director Takeshi Kitano, including Sonatine, Kids Return, Hana-bi and Brother, and wrote the score for Yōjirō Takita's Departures, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for 2008. He has also composed for the Ni no Kuni video games. Seven Japan Academy Prizes for Best Music and the Medal with Purple Ribbon, awarded by the Japanese state in 2009, recognise the domestic standing; in 2024 the animation community added the Winsor McCay Award.

The records that turned a film composer into a classical chart act

Hisaishi signed to Deutsche Grammophon and released A Symphonic Celebration, an album of orchestral suites drawn from the Miyazaki scores, on 30 June 2023. Its performance surprised even the label: more than 200 million streams, a No. 1 on Billboard's US classical chart, a peak of No. 74 on the Billboard 200 and, in 2023, a modern-era record for one-week vinyl sales of a classical album. Across his catalogue the label now counts more than 2.5 billion streams.

The follow-ups have pushed him towards the concert hall rather than back to the cinema. A recording pairing his conducting of Steve Reich with his own music sits in the DG catalogue, and on 24 July 2026 the label issued Symphony No. 3 and Harp Concerto, two works with no film attached. In 2024 the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra named him Composer-in-Association, and he now also holds titles as Composer in Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Composer in Focus with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and, most recently, Compositeur en Résonance with the Philharmonie de Paris.

The next release brings the two halves of his life together. Symphonic Suite The Boy and the Heron for piano and orchestra, recorded in April 2025 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Hisaishi himself at the keyboard, is due on 6 November 2026. He has described it as a standalone piece, independent of the film, in which the piano unifies the story's two worlds: a lonely child in the first half, a dark fantasy realm in the second. The Gray Heron motif, the Warawara music and A Song of Prayer are framed by the main theme, Ask Me Why. The suite had its first public performances with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at Esplanade Concert Hall in 2025.

Three Guinness records in a single summer

The scale of Hisaishi's live audience is now measured in stadium numbers. In August 2026 Guinness World Records certified three achievements. At the Tokyo Dome on 16 and 17 July 2025 he sold 133,453 tickets, the most by a classical composer for a single run at the venue. At the Hollywood Bowl on 21 to 23 July 2026, playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, his three nights sold 45,538 tickets, the highest-selling classical run in the venue's history. And at Radio City Music Hall in New York, seven consecutive nights from 11 to 17 August 2026 set the record for the longest single-run residency by a classical composer.

Asked about the run, the 75-year-old kept it plain: he had been taking things one step at a time, first in Japan, and then found that audiences around the world accepted the music when he took it abroad. His management describes the current phase as a new chapter across recording and live performance, and the diary bears that out. A press statement on 8 September 2026 counted a career of more than forty years in orchestral and film music and listed dates in Japan, the Netherlands, the United States, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland running through to 9 December.

The 2026 world tour and the Concerto for Orchestra

The 2026 schedule was announced in April as 43 confirmed performances across Asia, Europe and North America, the largest international programme of his career. It opened with four concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on 23 to 25 April, moved through Washington in mid-May and Toronto at the end of the month, then Hyogo and Osaka in June. On 28 June he played the Roman amphitheatre at Nîmes, and on 18 July made his Boston Symphony Orchestra debut at Tanglewood.

Two distinct programmes are touring. The first is the new Film Music Concert, which launched at Nîmes, Radio City, the Hollywood Bowl and the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra on 2 and 4 October. The second is built around the Concerto for Orchestra, a five-movement work of roughly 45 minutes that follows the form associated with Bartók and Lutosławski, placing the whole orchestra rather than a soloist at the centre. It was co-commissioned by an international consortium including Carnegie Hall, the National Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Hisaishi has said the aim is the pure motion of sound, informed by his years conducting Bartók and Steve Reich. He led the Orchestra of St. Luke's in the work at Carnegie Hall on 10 and 11 July, on a programme that opened with Philip Glass's Symphony No. 1, Low.

The autumn leg takes the concerto to Osaka on 17 and 18 September, Denver on 16 and 17 October, San Francisco on 22 to 24 October and Singapore on 12 and 13 November before a European run: the Royal Albert Hall on 23 November with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, then Munich's Isarphilharmonie on 25 November, KKL Lucerne on 26 November, the Liederhalle in Stuttgart on 28 November, the Philharmonie Berlin on 30 November and Hamburg on 2 December. The German and Swiss dates pair the concerto with The Boy and the Heron suite. Bookings for 2027 already include the Japan Century Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Houston Symphony, the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and a return to the Orchestre de Paris.

What the shows are like, and where the critics split

The Film Music Concert runs about two hours with a 25-minute interval. At the Hollywood Bowl in July 2026 the first half of roughly 45 minutes was given over to the lesser-known catalogue: an opening medley under rolling credits, Hisaishi's score for Buster Keaton's 1926 silent The General with the film projected in black and white, the Kitano collaborations Sonatine, Kids Return, Hana-bi and Brother, Water Traveller from Nobuhiko Obayashi's Samurai Kids, and Le Petit Poucet from the 2001 Claude Miller film, sung in French with English subtitles by the soprano Ariadne Greif.

The second half is the Ghibli sequence, organised as suites by film. The 22 July setlist ran from Nausicaä through Laputa, Totoro, Kiki, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo, The Wind Rises and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya to The Boy and the Heron, with a choir of some 60 to 80 students from California State University, Fullerton and Hisaishi's daughter Mai Fujisawa as vocal soloist. He conducts and plays piano himself on One Summer's Day from Spirited Away. The encore was My Neighbour Totoro with English vocals.

Reviewers agreed on the crowd and disagreed on the show. ArtsBeatLA's Pauline Adamek, reviewing the first of three sold-out evenings, described an audience that mixed lifelong classical concertgoers, Studio Ghibli devotees, families and younger fans, and praised the LA Philharmonic's sensitivity, Hisaishi's economical conducting and a programme that let film music stand on its own in the concert hall. Nick McCall in Stage and Cinema, writing about the 21 July performance, found the evening deeply unsatisfying despite loving the music: the Ghibli section averaged under three minutes per selection and felt like fan service, Chad Cannon's new orchestrations struck him as bombastic and at odds with the films' restraint, and the constant video screens meant audiences watched television instead of a live orchestra. He made an exception for Merry-Go-Round of Life from Howl's Moving Castle, which began quietly with carillon and harp and blossomed without excess.

The concert-work programmes are a different proposition. The Royal Albert Hall date on 23 November, billed as the UK premiere of the Concerto for Orchestra, starts at 7pm, has a 25-minute interval and is scheduled to end at about 9.20pm. It sold out, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is running a waiting list; tickets started at £54, with £11 seats for under-18s. The orchestra's own listing quotes the Guardian on Hisaishi's music as sweeping waves of sound, colourful post-minimalism topped by frothing strings, and describes the concerto as blending minimalism, Romanticism and Baroque influences.