Joe Hisaishi in Philadelphia

Joe Hisaishi is a Japanese composer, conductor and pianist born in 1950, best known for his scores to Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films. His work includes the music for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. He has also maintained a long collaboration with filmmaker Takeshi Kitano, scoring films including Sonatine and Hana-bi. In 2008, Joe Hisaishi presented Joe Hisaishi in Budokan: 25 Years with the Animations of Hayao Miyazaki at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo, conducting an orchestral and choral program drawn from their films. He later took Joe Hisaishi Symphonic Concert: Music from the Studio Ghibli Films of Hayao Miyazaki to international stages, conducting and performing at the piano during a 2022 run at Radio City Music Hall in New York.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is an American symphony orchestra founded in Philadelphia in 1900. Conductors Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy helped shape the rich ensemble sonority known as the “Philadelphia Sound,” and the orchestra is heard on the soundtrack to Walt Disney’s Fantasia. The orchestra gave its first concert at the Academy of Music in 1900, and the hall remained the base for its main subscription season until 2001. The season then moved to Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center, an auditorium now named Marian Anderson Hall. Its 1973 tour made it the first American orchestra to tour the People’s Republic of China, including concerts in Beijing and Shanghai.