Kanno is a rare artist that, in my opinion, totally lives up to the hype. Otaku music collectors consistently express their love for her work, and rightly so. She is unbelievably versatile, able to jump from genre to genre, jazz to new age, rock and roll to piano ballads, orchestral to modern/experimental, often all within the same soundtrack. I'd have to admire her if only for her stunning range in creativity. But given the fact that she has also composed some of my favorite musical pieces of all time, she is an artist who is at least among my top three favorite composers ever, if not number one.
This particular track is one of her more conventional pieces; a fairly straightforward orchestral arrangement of the theme to "Nobunaga's Ambition: Bushou Fuunroku", developed by the aforementioned Koei in 1990. A music album of arrangements (as opposed to the original chiptunes) was released that same year, but this recording is of a live performance, two years later, during the second in a series of concerts held in Japan. These "Game Music Concerts" were among the first to perform video game music with a live orchestra in front of an audience (although not the very first). They were also the first orchestral arrangements of video game music I had ever heard back when I discovered them around 1998. (It was these concerts that sent me on a rabid hunt for video game arrangements over the next fourteen years, and boy did I find what I was looking for). Yoko Kanno wrote the original composition, this arrangement and, as far as I can tell, conducted the orchestra in this recording. It's Kanno at every creative step here, and although her style isn't exactly what it resembles today, and the orchestra isn't as tight as some more recent concert performances have been, the song is still as stirring as it ever was. Considering how long I've had it, I can only assume this is the first Yoko Kanno song I ever heard, and I hope you like it as much as I did.
Album info: http://vgmdb.net/album/878
No comments:
Post a Comment