Candlelight: The Best of Joe Hisaishi

Candlelight: The Best of Joe Hisaishi arranges an animation-film composer's catalogue for string quartet and plays it in a room lit by candles. The music was written to sit beside images, and taking the images away turns out to reveal rather than diminish it.

Hisaishi writes tunes that behave like folk song: short, symmetrical, easy to sing back and built on simple harmonic ground that he then complicates by degrees. Underneath that surface sits a minimalist habit of repeating a small cell and letting it shift, which is what gives the scores their forward motion. Both traits suit a quartet exactly. The melody can be handed round the four parts without losing its shape, and the accompanying figures are already the kind of interlocking patterns strings play well.

By candlelight and unamplified, what registers is the restraint. These are not big statements; the emotional weight comes from a phrase repeated once too often, or a chord that resolves later than expected. Heard close up, without a screen to look at, the writing carries the whole room on its own.