Joe Hisaishi Announces ‘The Boy And The Heron’ Symphonic Suite
The world-premiere recording arrives November 6 through Deutsche Grammophon.
The world premiere recording of Joe Hisaishi‘s The Boy and the Heron Symphonic Suite for Piano and Orchestra will be released by Deutsche Grammophon on November 6, 2026. Reworked from Hisaishi’s Golden Globe-nominated score for Hayao Miyazaki’s Academy Award-winning Studio Ghibli film The Boy and the Heron, the album presents the music as a standalone concert work for solo piano and orchestra. Limited-edition colored-vinyl and picture-disc editions will be sold exclusively through the DG store.
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The album was recorded in April 2025 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with Hisaishi playing the central piano part. He said he usually prepares a suite from a film score in the same year as the movie’s release, but chose to wait before revisiting this project. “This time I waited a little longer, and then decided to entirely rewrite the music for the concert hall,” Hisaishi said. “The Symphonic Suite is therefore a standalone piece, completely independent from the film.”
Several themes from the movie are recast within the new work, including the dissonant “Gray Heron” motif, the livelier “Warawara,” and “A Song of Prayer.” The suite opens and closes with the main theme, “Ask me why,” which returns in a longer form near the end. Hisaishi said the piano was used to connect the story’s two settings: Mahito’s loneliness in the real world and the dark fantasy realm he enters later. “I decided to unify these two worlds musically by placing my own piano at the heart of the score,” he said.
Hisaishi’s collaboration with Miyazaki dates back to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1984, a film whose success helped lead to the founding of Studio Ghibli. For The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki showed Hisaishi the film only when it was close to completion and gave him latitude to write the soundtrack he felt matched the story.
