Press Play: Anime Edition
Hartford Symphony Orchestra
Center for Contemporary Culture
Hartford Public Library
Hartford
Feb. 25, 2026
I couldn’t help it. I started grinning like an idiot as soon as I recognized the infamous beat drop from “Gurenge.”
For the uninitiated, that’s the first opening theme from the anime Demon Slayer, one of the most popular anime of the last decade. It was brought to life Wednesday by a string quartet from the Hartford Symphony Orchestra as it performed a greatest hits catalogue of recent and older anime themes for an intimate crowd. (Recording was not allowed due to copyright concerns.)
Anime has been in the mainstream for years now, with celebrities shouting out their favorite heroes and Goku showing up in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. One of the most critical aspects of anime’s success is the various opening and ending themes for the shows. Opening/closing credits are an afterthought for many other television shows; longer anime shows can change their openings/closings more than a dozen times during their run. There are passionate debates among fan communities about which season of a favorite show has the best opening and closing songs.
Violinists Simon Bilyk and Candy Lammers, violist Michael Wheeler, and cellist Peter Zay brought those energetic discussions into the real world with their song selection. The first song I recognized was the main theme to Half Demon Inuyasha. The brilliance of Inuyasha is that it tricked millions of teenage boys, myself included, into thinking that they were watching an action anime. In reality, Inuyasha was a love story. The HSO string quartet captured both the sweeping adventure of traveling around feudal Japan and the tender exchanges between the two main characters, Inuyasha and Kagome. Inuyasha was on the air when I was in high school, so I appreciated them digging into the back catalogue.
These shows aren’t just for middle-aged people to feel nostalgic about their past. They also aim to connect newer audiences to the work that HSO does. I brought my son to the show with me, and he immediately picked out hits he recognized from more recent anime such as Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man and Tokyo Ghoul.
The skill of the HSO performers can’t be overstated. Despite many of the songs originating as essentially Japanese pop, these aren’t simple arrangements. The technical demands of recreating themes and sounds that were produced by larger ensembles resulted in some challenging sections of music, but the professionals of HSO handled them with ease. One thing I hadn’t considered was when Mr. Bilyk discussed how different it was to play anime music, because the lyrics are in Japanese and recreating those on a string instrument results in interesting cadences that the performers don’t usually play.
The song that got the biggest smile out of me was “Wings of Freedom,” the second opening of the classic anime Attack on Titan. It’s an ambitious song. The HSO quartet did it justice by making four instruments sound as large as the man-eating giants the heroes in Attack on Titan face. I won’t spoil the show because if you haven’t watched it, you really should. But listening to the HSO brought me back to sitting on the edge of my seat. Openings become strongly attached to the story beats that occur during their run, and man, the story of Attack on Titan was nuts when the second opening was running.
My son and I greatly enjoyed the HSO concert. It brought back some wonderful memories, and reminded me that there are some great shows now that I need to catch up on.
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Jamil heads to Theaterworks to check out The Counter.
