The BSO’s tribute to undisputed master film scorer and beloved Pops Emeritus Conductor John Williams unfolded in the Hall last night as something of a love fest for the players. And management certainly had no complaints about the $5 million which Williams had contributed. Beginning with a sparkling account of “Joy Ride,” the third movement of the suite Escapades, taken from “Catch Me if You Can,” the audience also embraced the music and the man in an absolute love-in. The back and forth between a jazz combo of sax, vibes, and double bass with the larger ensemble allowed for both to swing. What a charming score and film. One can easily re-imagine the Saul Bass-inspired opening titles flash by. In tasking themselves with responsiveness to the Spielberg film’s 60s feel, designers, Kuntzel + Deygas sketched and animated “…characters with sixties haircuts, clothes, and postures, but the music by John Williams brings a lot more of that 60s feeling! Try another piece of music and you’ll see it does not fit.”

Nobody doesn’t like the movie scores of John Williams. And nearly everyone (with the exceptions of Robert Bresson and Lars von Trier, the author of Dogma 95) likes incidental (non-diegetic) music to establish moods and give psychological dimensions to characters. A golden age of movie music didn’t begin, as many think, with Korngold’s immortal effusions for Warner Brothers in the 1930s. It rather began even before the establishment of the film industry, having taken root as early as Lully’s 1661 incidental music for  Molière’s play “Les Fâcheux” (The Bores). One also thinks of Handel’s Fire and Water musics, Mendelssohn’s delightful enhancements for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and Grieg’s Peer Gynt incidental music.

Saint Saëns owns the distinction of writing the first score for a photoplay, his 1909 background music (played by an orchestra in a pit) for “L’Assassinat du duc de Guise.” In the closing years of the silent era, some major scores guided audiences through many hours of brilliantly imagined visual genius. Arthur Honegger, in a surprisingly short number of weeks, compiled a score for Abel Gance’s seven-hour-long “La Roue.” His tone poem Pacific 231 may be the first extended concert work to have originated as a background to a photoplay.

Beginning with his extensive derangement of Mendelssohn for Warner’s loopy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Korngold set the standard for tinsel town. Perhaps his best remembered score, for the Errol Flynn’s “Robin Hood,” like the movie itself, exists, as others have said, as a golden arrow shot straight through all time.

John Williams certainly knew the film work of Korngold, as well as Max Steiner, Ligeti (via 2001: A Space Odyssey), Prokofiev, and Bernard Herrman; if he didn’t surpass them in brilliance, he certainly equaled them in memorably evocative work, and far exceeded them in cinema output. Others have posited that his style is informed by Grieg, Strauss, and Holst. His film scores can also stand on their own without the films that they had originally sonified. He can read the minds of characters and underscore action like few others.

Who knew, though, that he had studied piano with Rosina Lhévinne at Juilliard in the 1950s? According to Jeff Lundon, “He originally planned on becoming a concert pianist, but after hearing John Browning and Van Cliburn, he switched his focus to composition, recalling that he could write better than he could play. During his studies, Williams found work in many of the city’s jazz clubs as a pianist.” In addition to his over-100 film scores, he has written 26 orchestral works, nine chamber works, and 20 concertos, two of which we heard last night.

To reprise the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, written for the BSO and premiered with Emmanuel Ax and Nelsons at Tanglewood last summer, the pair entered to an ecstatic response from an audience warmed up by the earlier, irresistible five-minute film score. These ears took to the colorful orchestration of the concerto, Ax’s restrained virtuosity, Steve Ansell’s exquisite viola aria, Greg Floor’s keening sax, and Timothy Genis’s command of his timpani arsenal. But my heart did not engage, and the tributes to Art Tatum, Bill Evans, and Oscar Petersen in the three movements came across as homages from a respectful distance. I also detected a self-tribute to “Catch Me If You Can.” My jazz-pianist friend wrote: “In the first movement, Art Tatum’s linear virtuosity is there, and in the second, Bill Evan’s grandiose and harmonic complexity are evident, especially in the way that the slowness is achieved (by John Williams). In the Oscar Peterson, I am not sure that I can find any resemblance. It sounds more Prokofiev inspired.”¹

Ax and the orchestra rewarded the standing ovation with the pleasantries of the Theme from “Sabrina.”

Last summer Leon Golub wrote with rapture about the debut in Tanglewood of John Williams’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra:

Williams composed the work for Emanuel Ax and at Ax’s request, not without some trepidation, he confesses, because of the enormous canon” of piano and orchestra masterpieces. How does one expand the repertoire meaningfully?

The gripping first movement, labelled “introduction – Colloquy (Art Tatum),” revealed his ingenious and loving solution of commemorating the great jazz pianist Art Tatum, whom a teenaged Williams had heard play live in L.A. Extracting Tatum’s “sound” from its jazzy context, Williams gave it a transfigured new life. After three introductory chords (a gesture that Williams remembered from Tatum), Ax produced impossibly sparkling high notes like drops of a quenching rain, which suddenly blurred just as impossibly into sheets of sound, prompting the orchestra to respond with a contrasting low brooding sound, somber and marvelously cavernous, as though turning a vast expanse of darkness into a protected place of ritual initiation – a rock shelter in the wilderness, a jazz club, a Shed. Strings then entered to create tension with a tinge of Stravinsky-esque barbaric urgency, horns and harp colluding to reinforce a feeling of angst while Ax’s luminous piano took on the joyous freedom of chimes, unbowed and unrepentant in its irrepressible vitality.

The Andante, “Listening (Bill Evans – Dreamily)” invited us into a moody, ethereal sphere of atmospheric meditation. Once again, as Ax beautifully understood, Williams had stripped Bill Evans’s delicate pianistic touch from its parochial context and set it free to soar into the balmy Tanglewood night to live a new life of pure quintessence. Responding to Steve Ansell’s opening solo viola that called forth a pensive melancholy gently bordering on the sublime, Ax imbued the piano with tenderness and nostalgia. He emphasized the emotion of regret by giving voice to a recognizably fin de siècle phrasing hinting at sentimentality, set against an aesthetics of kenotic indifference in the orchestra, reminiscent at times of Philip Glass. Angst emerged, even erupted, in the strings and briefly contaminated the keyboard, only to be vanquished by rippling scales affirming the inexhaustible pleasure of cherished memories in the face of darkness.

Held at bay through the force of memory, darkness returned with vitality and vengeance with Tim Genis’s opening timpani of the Finale, marked “presto (Oscar Peterson; Phineas Newborn Jr.)” Ax delivered the energy and sinister brilliance of a Totentanz, surging in raucous, pugnacious jabs at the macabre army of strings closing in as grimacing skeletons. When the trombone cornered the piano, Ax wrangled with it defiantly, waging a heroic but losing battle, succumbing to the trombone’s power and limping away, subdued and forlorn. The orchestra now came for Ax, who rushed frantically up and down his scales in search of an escape, pouring his last resources of vitality into an eagle’s flight, with the orchestra in close pursuit. Together Williams and Ax infused a Byronic grandeur into their homage to Peterson as though recognizing that every passionate musician is a prince of our Disorder – but also a recurrent and irrepressible figure of savaged innocence, like a gifted eternal child galloping through a thick Black Forest pursued by the Erlkönig.

And Byronic they were when Williams appeared on stage and he and Ax embraced, applauded by a deliriously enthusiastic audience saluting the youthful energy of those hoary visages! Time dwarfs our bodies and eviscerates our bones, but is powerless against our devotion to tell our stories in music and commemorate each other limitlessly, joining the dead to the yet unborn.

When heard in Symphony Hall rather than in the Koussevitsky Shed at Tanglewood, without summer’s open expansiveness, the Concerto revealed its more taut and coherent inner structure. Many subtler nuances were more audible, and the driven power of the work made a more blunt but lasting impact.  

TreeSong for violin and orchestra (2001) encompasses three programmatic movements taken attacca: Doctor Hu and the Metasequoia; Trunks, Branches, and Leaves; and The Tree Sings. Through all the evocative and sometimes ecstatic meanderings, violinist Gil Shaham presided as sweet-toned and genial tour guide. Though at quiet levels much of the time, he glowed with committed tone and embraced the warmth of old-school slides, especially in the lyrical, middle-movement, which contains a tribute to Williams’ late wife. We found much originality in the orchestration: sighing, repeated, harp notes sounding like a celesta; various permutations of xylophone, marimba, and chimes; triangles pinging like Rosenkavalier; delicacies of ppp shimmering from the violins in high ranges; and a strange duet of bassoon and piccolo. Styles ranged from Darmstadtesque to Lincoln Portrait affirmation. The slow fade of the brushed cymbal placed us in a suspended hush, effectively setting up what followed.

I can’t describe it better than the New York Times: [The Theme from “Schindler’s List] is atmospheric, languorous, perfectly styled, ingeniously orchestrated, there to remind us that Williams is a composer of breathtaking capacity. Hearing Shaham play these passionate melodies could break the strongest heart, and not simply because of their association with the crushing film for which they were composed. This is some of the strongest film music since Bernard Herrmann wrote the score for “Citizen Kane.”

You don’t have to be a child or an alien to love the score from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Williams wrote in many voices to set up the musical Morse code by which the wide-eyed Barry communicated with the gentle flying saucer denizen: ghostly col legno, Bernard Herrmann 12 tone effects, Ligeti’s cosmic “Space Odyssey” Atmosphères, and some reassuringly Holstish planetoids. Very pleasant, withal, and  it ended quietly.

Thus did the concert close with the Imperial March from “The Emperor Stikes Back” in a big-hearted traversal filling the Hall with LA vibe, as the 32 ft. underpinnings of the Symphony Hall Organ rumbled defiantly.

Lee Eiseman is the publisher of the Intelligencer

¹ John Williams writes: Composing a piano concerto was, for me, particularly challenging given the enormous canon of rich and diverse piano and orchestral masterworks created over the past centuries. Although my effort here is not a jazz piece per se, much of the impetus to write it down has been my memory of the particular “sound” produced by three legendary jazz pianists. Past this simple concept, the music is in no way an attempt to serve as a portrait of each of these artists, but merely to suggest and remember the unique artistic personalities of three men who greatly inspired me along with so many other lovers of the piano around the world.

Firstly, Art Tatum. When I was 15 or 16 years old, I remember a scene in a Los Angeles jazz club which welcomed underaged patrons providing they didn’t drink. I saw a large man who was clearly not sighted being carefully guided to his place at the piano. The lights were turned down so as not to offend his eyes. He seemed to be huge. His piano also seemed enormous… not with the usual 88 keys, but seemingly with twelve additional keys at either end of the keyboard, accommodating his massive reach. The size of his sound was awesome and remind one of Rachmaninoff. He played three chords, listened, and played them again with an added note or two. He seemed satisfied and then began with a brief cadenza which served as his warm-up. The avalanche of gems that followed could hardly be imagined.

Secondly, Bill Evans. The second movement begins with a viola solo. Why? This may be because Bill was a quiet and very ethereal man who, when he approached the piano, always seemed to be less interested in playing than listening to what the piano may have to tell us. His piano eventually joins the viola, supporting Bill’s ethereal mood while further investigations ensue.

Thirdly, tall, handsome Oscar Peterson emerges, looking like an NFL wide receiver on his day off. After a brief salutation from the timpani, he begins with a bristling and famous “bebop” passage composed by whom we do not know but often attributed to Oscar and to the late Phineas Newborn, who also possessed a similar technical prowess. It serves as a reminder of Oscar’s athletic affinity, which he always displayed with taste and the most graceful control.

I’ve always so greatly admired pianist Emanuel Ax, who is universally celebrated for his technical brilliance, refined elegance and great artistic sensibilities. He is also one of the most gracious gentlemen I’ve had the privilege to know. When I first met Manny years ago, I asked him if in his travels he ever encountered a bad piano. He replied simply, “all pianos are my friends.” I had only mentioned to a few friends and associates that I might be interested in writing a work for piano and orchestra.

You can imagine my surprise and delight when Manny called me to say, “if you write it, I will play it!” I could not have been more grateful and honored.