May 6, 2026 | Beverly Hills, CA On Saturday, May 16, 2026 at 7:30pm, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts presents Bang on a Can All-Stars in a powerful live tribute, RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, 1996. Tickets are available at thewallis.org.
Sakamoto was a composer of breathtaking range—an artist who scored the emotions of entire generations. From the Oscar-winning grandeur of The Last Emperor to the aching intimacy of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, his music was both deeply personal and profoundly cinematic.
This is a celebration of legacy—a chance to experience Sakamoto’s music as it was never heard before: raw, intimate, and alive. With each movement, the All-Stars honor a visionary who composed without boundaries and dreamed in sound. They don’t just perform Sakamoto’s music. They invite us into his world.
Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023) was arguably the best-known and most successful Japanese musician in the world. Even a casual glance through his portfolio satisfies the question of his iconic status in contemporary music, popular music and film com-position. His Oscar for the soundtrack to Bernardo Bertolucci’s, The Last Emperor is certainly the most obvious laurel among a collection of several Golden Globes and Grammys for other films. His score for the 1992 Olympic Games opening ceremony in Barcelona was viewed by over a billion people around the world. Westerners gravitated to his unique style and aesthetic, thus his association with luminaries of the music world such as Thomas Dolby, Brian Wilson and Laurie Anderson.
The musicians of Bang on a Can All-Stars have long adored Sakamoto’s work and in the 1996 project, they carefully transcribe and recreate the same-named original recording for live performance, much of it for the first time, as they did previously with Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. The album 1996 includes an incredible selection of tracks, many of Sakamoto’s most well-known. Bang on a Can All-Stars playing 1996 is an exploration, a tribute and a celebration of one of the most influential contemporary musicians of his time
Sakamoto’s film scores are renowned for their diversity and sensitivity, it is rare for a band to play this music live. and now the Bang on a Can All-Stars realize their own new live arrangements of the album 1996 (arranged by the All-Stars’ multi-talented clarinetist-composer Ken Thomson) — which includes an incredible selection of many of Sakamoto’s greatest hits – music from films including The Last Emperor, Wuthering Heights, The Sheltering Sky, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and more.
Ryuichi Sakamoto has lived many musical lives in his nearly 70 years. As a keyboardist and songwriter in Haruomi Hosono’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, he helped set the stage for synthpop. His solo experiments in fusing global genres and close studies of classical impressionism led to him scoring over 30 films in as many years, including Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant.
In the past 20 years alone, he’s wrote a multimedia opera, turned a glass building into an instrument, and travelled to the Arctic to record the sound of melting snow. That exploratory spirit runs through Sakamoto’s 2017 album, async, which paints an audio portrait of the passing of time informed by his recovery from throat cancer. “Music, work, and life all have a beginning and an ending,” said Sakamoto in early 2019. “What I want to make now is music freed from the constraints of time.”
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills. To purchase single tickets, subscriptions and for more information, please call 310-746-4000 (Monday – Friday, 10 am to 6 pm) or visit TheWallis.org.
Bang on a Can All-Stars
- Lizzie Burns, bass
- Vicky Chow, piano
- David Cossin, percussion
- Arlen Hlusko, cello
- Taylor Levine, guitar
- Ken Thomson, clarinet and bass clarinet
About Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023) (from sitesakamoto.com)
When Ryuichi Sakamoto was a high schooler in Tokyo, he had to ride a commuter train to get to class. The passengers were always crammed on, trapping one another between stray limbs and contorted torsos. Unable to move, all the teenage Sakamoto could do was listen. He amused himself by counting the sounds the train made, identifying more than 10 that he would listen out for every morning.
Close listening is a habit that carried Sakamoto through nearly 70 years of musical exploration, each decade leading him in new directions. He was born in 1952, the year John Cage composed 4′33″. When he was a toddler, he was introduced to the piano, an instrument he would go on to examine from many Cageian angles. As the ’70s bled into the ’80s, he segued from an ethnomusicology and composition degree to the role of keyboardist and songwriter for Yellow Magic Orchestra, the proto-synthpop group led by Haruomi Hosono. In the solo career years that followed, Sakamoto’s embrace of a new wave of electronic instruments led to fruitful experiments in fusing global genres, which in turn made way for close studies of classical impressionism. Many times over Sakamoto’s sonic path has leapt forward then looped back on itself, forever telling the present something of both its past and future.
The how of composition is as important to Sakamoto as what he makes, and more often than not his creative process starts with improvisation. “You have to open your ears all the time because anything could happen unexpectedly,” he has said of his approach. “Anything can be music.” A wrong note could be the right way into a fresh musical idea. The sounds of a city at night might inform the architecture of a new album. In fact, it was a building that inspired Glass, Sakamoto’s 2016 live improvised composition with longtime friend Alva Noto. Specifically, Philip Johnson’s modernist Glass House, which the American architect built in Connecticut in the late ’40s to live in. As part of their performance, Sakamoto and Noto played Johnson’s glass and steel home like an instrument, sweeping rubber mallets over its contact mic’d surfaces.
The relationship between space and sound, how the one reflects and refracts the other, is something that Sakamoto has also explored in his collaborations with visual artists. In All Star Video (1984), his digital compositions were augmented by Nam June Paik’s hyperactive video art. In 1999, he premiered his multimedia opera LIFE, for which he made Shiro Takatani his visual director. Expanding on LIFE’s themes of symbiosis and evolution, Sakamoto and Takatani went on to produce several ambient installations together, which combined art objects, audio, and video. In 2018, Sakamoto’s various art project collaborations were brought together for the first time in Seoul, as part of a retrospective exhibition titled LIFE, LIFE.
Outside of his artistic practice, Sakamoto has written music for a wide variety of settings, including the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, a health tonic ad (which grew into “Energy Flow”), and an episode of “Black Mirror” (2019). However, it is his contributions to cinema for which he is most often recognized. He has scored over 30 films in as many years, including Nagisa Oshima’s “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” Bernardo Bertolulcci’s “The Last Emperor” and “The Sheltering Sky,” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s” The Revenant”, and Yoji Yamada’s “Nagasaki: Memories of My Son.” His cinematic accolades include an Academy Award, a GRAMMY®, a BAFTA, and two Golden Globe awards. “Working on a film is like a journey to an unknown place,” Sakamoto once said . “I cannot experience that doing my own thing.”
In later years, the Sakamoto who once counted all the sounds he could hear on his train journey to school resurfaced with renewed vigor. His 2017 album, “async” paints an audio portrait of the passing of time, informed by his recovery from throat cancer. In a documentary released the same year – “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda,” directed by Stephen Nomura Schible – he travels to the Arctic to record the sound of melting snow. In another scene, he plays a “drowned” piano that was found in the Miyagi Prefecture during the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake-tsunami that triggered a nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. “We humans say [the piano] falls out of tune,” Sakamoto says in “Coda.” “But that’s not exactly accurate. Matter is struggling to return to a natural state.”
These sonic observations are not just aesthetic; they run in parallel to Sakamoto’s environmental and activism work. He was an anti-nuclear campaigner and the founder of the more trees project, which is involved in reforestation and carbon offsetting. The veins that connect Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music, art, and activism are his meditations on the ever-evolving nature of life. “Music, work, and life all have a beginning and an ending.”
About Bang on a Can All-Stars
Formed in 1992, the Bang on a Can All-Stars are recognized worldwide for their ultra-dynamic live performances and recordings of today’s most innovative music. Freely crossing the boundaries between classical, jazz, rock, world and experimental music, this six-member amplified ensemble has consistently forged a distinct category-defying identity, taking music into uncharted territories. Performing each year throughout the U.S. and internationally, the All-Stars have shattered the definition of what concert music is today.
Together, the All-Stars have worked in unprecedented close collaboration with some of the most important and inspiring musicians of our time, including Steve Reich, Ornette Coleman, Meredith Monk, George Lewis, Louis Andriessen, Terry Riley and dozens more. The group’s celebrated projects include their landmark recordings of Brian Eno’s ambient classic Music for Airports and Terry Riley’s In C, as well as live performances with Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Don Byron, Iva Bittová, Thurston Moore, Owen Pallett and others. The All-Stars were awarded Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year and have been heralded as “the country’s most important vehicle for contemporary music” by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Current and recent project highlights include their own new arrangements of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s landmark album 1996; David Lang’s before and after nature premiered with the LA Master Chorale; Julia Wolfe’s Flower Power for Bang on a Can All-Stars and orchestra, premiered with the LA Philharmonic; a new live arrangement of Terry Riley’s iconic and inspirational A Rainbow in Curved Air, celebrating the legendary composer’s 90th Birthday year (2025); a recording of legendary composer/performer Meredith Monk’s MEMORY GAME; Can Dance, a multimedia concert of collaborations between composers, filmmakers and choreographers; performances of the band’s much beloved arrangement of Brian Eno’s classic Music for Airports; Road Trip, an immersive and visually stunning concert collaboratively-composed by Bang’s founders Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe; In C, a dance collaboration with Sasha Waltz & Guests based on Terry Riley’s minimalist classic; performances and recordings of Wolfe’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Anthracite Fields and groundbreaking Steel Hammer; a collaboration featuring Chinese superstar singer Gong Linna called Cloud River Mountain; and much more.
With a massive repertoire of works written specifically for the group’s distinctive instrumentation and style of performance, the All-Stars have become a genre in their own right. The All-Stars record on Cantaloupe Music and have released past recordings on Sony, Universal and Nonesuch.
About The Wallis.
The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (The Wallis) was lauded by Culture Vulture: “If you love expecting the unexpected in the performing arts, you have to love The Wallis.” Broadway legend Patti LuPone described the venue as “one of the best in the country, allowing for an unparalleled intimacy between [the artist] and the audience.”
Since its doors opened in 2013, The Wallis, located in the heart of Beverly Hills, CA, is a dynamic cultural hub and community resource where local, national, and international performers share their artistry with ever-expanding audiences. Distinguished by eclectic programming that mirrors the diverse landscape of Los Angeles and its location in the entertainment capital of the world, The Wallis has produced and presented nearly 500 theater, dance, music, film, cabaret, comedy, performance arts, and family entertainment programs, boasting nominations for 79 Ovation Awards and nine L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards, as well as six architectural awards.
The breathtaking 70,000-square-foot facility, celebrating the classic and the modern, was named after philanthropist Wallis Annenberg, who’s original $25-million-dollar donation was instrumental in transforming the beloved former 1934 Beverly Hills Post Office (on the National Register of Historic Places) into an arts complex. Designed by acclaimed architect Zoltan E. Pali (SPF: architects), the restored building features one of two sets of eight towering original WPA frescos, these by Charles Kassler, remaining in the entire California Federal Building system. The Wallis’ lobby, now known as Jim and Eleanor Randall Grand Hall, serves as the theater’s dramatic yet welcoming entryway to the contemporary 500-seat, state-of-the-art Bram Goldsmith Theater; the 150-seat Lovelace Studio Theater; an inviting open-air plaza for family, community and other performances; and GRoW @ The Wallis: A Space for Arts Education, where learning opportunities for all ages and backgrounds abound. Together, these elements embrace both the region’s history and its future, creating a performing arts destination for Los Angeles area visitors and residents alike.
Daphna Nazarian is Chair of The Wallis’ Board of Directors and Jean Davidson is its Executive Director and CEO.