On 24 April, we held our first concert in Breda, bringing Hayao Miyazaki’s Dreams by Mystery Ensemble to the atmospheric Grote Kerk. For one evening, the historic church became a meeting place for music, memory and the dreamlike worlds of Japanese animation.
The programme was dedicated to the music of Joe Hisaishi, the composer whose melodies have become inseparable from the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Themes from Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind sounded under the high arches of Grote Kerk, gaining a new sense of space and stillness.
Performed by Mystery Ensemble, the music moved with colour and tenderness. Hisaishi’s scores are built on delicate contrasts: childhood wonder and quiet sadness, flight and contemplation, fairy-tale brightness and almost weightless silence. In the setting of Grote Kerk, these contrasts felt especially vivid. Familiar pieces such as One Summer Day, Path of the Wind, Carrying You and The Legend of Ashitaka seemed to unfold slowly, as if each melody had found its own echo in the architecture.
For us, the first concert in Breda became a meaningful step into a new city. Grote Kerk offered exactly the kind of setting where music can become more than performance — where sound, history and atmosphere begin to respond to one another.
