This time last week, Japan’s oldest symphony orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, was performing one of two cinema concerts in accompaniment with a screening of Star Wars: A New Hope. The concert venue was the futuristic Tokyo International Forum, where lighted walkways lead into Hall A, a double-tiered, proscenium-style theater that seats over 5,000 people.
Conductor Keitaro Harada, who served as an assistant to John Williams himself on several projects, led a similar live performance of the legendary composer’s original film score in Osaka the weekend before last. Tokyo added a second show by popular demand, and they seem to have opened up the very front seats in Hall A at the last minute. I only heard about the show a few days beforehand, but we lucked out and snagged seats front and center in the third row of this massive hall, with all those thousands of people behind us.
Our entrance door was R2, appropriately enough. As Harada took the stage, we were looking right up at him and had a good view of the surrounding string musicians as they played through the movie.
This was the first time for Azusa to see the original Star Wars on the big screen. Our first date back in 2014 happened to be right across the street at the restaurant Mucho Modern Mexicano. At night, it’s like walking into a pink rain of LED lights there.
For me, it had been over 25 years since I last saw Star Wars on the big screen, back when they did the Special Edition rerelease in 1997. Seeing the 4K version of it projected, it was almost like the colors were too bright, with faces both larger than life and more orange. However, I’d always wanted to see a concert at the Tokyo International Forum, which is an architectural marvel in its own right.
On the outside, it looks like a glass cruise ship cutting through the city, between Yurakucho Station and Tokyo Station. On the inside, it’s one big atrium, crisscrossed with catwalks, which you can ascend to see a view that’s like something out of a science fiction movie. Perfect for Star Wars.
A New Hope in Concert
As for the cinema concert, imagine sitting in on an orchestra as it records soundtrack music for a movie on the scoring stage. The focus is on music and visuals. In the case of Star Wars, that music can be rousing, with the conductor waving his baton spiritedly like a magic wand, and the audience breaking out in applause as characters make their first appearance and other crowd-pleasing moments occur. When the music is going, however, it overpowers other elements of the sound mix like dialogue, in a way that’s almost reminiscent of a Christopher Nolan film.
It’s only in scenes where there’s no music and the orchestra takes a rest that you can hear everything onscreen, and you start to get caught up in the story again. The Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra didn’t play the famous diegetic music during the “Cantina Band” scene in Star Wars. That was still provided by Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes. Yet for 2 hours and 26 minutes — from the 20th Century Fox fanfare and opening crawl to the final awards ceremony scene and closing credits — the orchestra demonstrated some world-class musicianship onstage in Hall A.
The performance broke for a 20-minute intermission when it got to the scene where there’s a close-up of the Millennium Falcon being dragged into the Death Star by its tractor beam. Not for nothing, but this is the first time I’ve ever been at an event or in a crowded place where the line for the men’s room was five times longer than the one for the ladies’ room. Maybe that says something about the demographic for Star Wars.
I canceled my Disney+ subscription when the actors’ strike started, so I’m a little behind on Star Wars and haven’t seen the latest series, Ahsoka. When it comes to Star Wars in Japan, though, I guess this cinema concert proves there’s still some music left in these old bones. That will continue until at least 2025 when Tokyo hosts the next Star Wars Celebration.
