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As John Williams Turns 90, No Signs of
Slowing Down, With ‘Fabelmans, ‘Indiana
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By Jon Burlingame V
John Williams turns 90 years old on Feb. 8, And the world’s most famous
film composer shows no signs of slowing down.
The five-time Oscar winner, creator of many of the most well-known movie
themes of all time — everything from “Jaws” and “Star Wars” to “E.T.” and
“Harry Potter” — is finishing work on two new film scores and, COVID
permitting, plans to conduct concerts with at least five orchestras between
April and November.
Commemorating Williams’ nonagenarian status is the release of “John.
Williams: The Berlin Concert,” a two-disc Deutsche Grammophon set
recorded during the composer's Oct. 14-16 concerts with the Berlin
Philharmonic.
The 93-minute collection includes many of Williams’ familiar signature
tunes — “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Jur
ic Park,” “Superman”
— plus a few less familiar pieces, including his theme for “Solo: A Star Wars
Story” and his moving, non-film “Elegy for Cello and Orchestra.”
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The Berlin album might be considered a companion piece for last year’s
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“John Williams: Live in Vienna” set, another instance of the American
composer conducting one of Europe’s most renowned orchestras. That one
includes music not on the Berlin album, including music from “Jaws,”
“Schindler's List,” “The Witches of Eastwick” and “Hook.” Williams will
return to Vienna for birthday concerts on March 12 and 13.
Already a Kennedy Center Honors recipient, he will revisit that Washington
landmark on June 23 for what the National Symphony Orchestra is billing
as a “90th birthday gala concert” featuring violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter,
cellist Yo-Yo Ma and longtime filmmaking partner Steven Spielberg.
Williams was unavailable for this story as he is finishing work on the score
for Spielberg's next film, “The Fabelmans,” expected to record next month
in Los Angeles. The film, inspired by Spielberg’s own childhood in Arizona,
is slated for a Nov. 23 release.
“Fabelmans” marks their 29th film collaboration since “The Sugarland
Express,” their first, in 1974. Seventeen of Williams’ 52 Oscar nominations
(an all-time record for scoring) are for Spielberg films, including three of
his five wins (“Jaws,” “E.T.,” “Schindler”).
Williams is also working on the score for the fifth “Indiana Jones” movie,
slated for release in mid-2023. And he continues to write music for the
concert hall: last year, with Mutter, he debuted his second violin concerto.
Younger composers routinely cite Williams as a role model, not just for his
classic scores but for his compositional prowess (as in the modernist
Encounters of the Third Kind”) and his
complexity of a score like “Cl
knack for finding the right dramatic approach for every story (minimalism
for “A.L.,” jazz saxophone for “Catch Me If You Can,” Japanese colors for
“Memoirs of a Geisha”).
Williams
began to conduct in public, eventually making film music a staple of pops
In the aftermath of his popular success with 1977's “Star Wars,
concerts. And while Henry Mancini had begun this in the 1960s, it was
Williams who became a kind of rock star on the concert stage, with tens of
thousands of fans waving plastic lightsabers in time to the music at the
Hollywood Bowl and beyond.
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Composer David Newman, who often conducts film music in live concert
settings, cites Williams’ 14-year tenure as music director for the Boston
Pops (1980-93) as the launching pad that eventually led to today’s popular
—and, for orchestras, lucrative — live-to-film concert performances.
“John convinced a fairly conservative institution to play more and more
film music,” Newman points out. World-class orchestras like those in Berlin
and Vienna now playing movie music in concert, he adds, “would have been
unthinkable without John’s persistence in presenting not just his own
music, but the whole world of film music.”
Williams’ longevity in the business surprises even his closest colleagues. He
has been writing music for films and TV since 1958, an unprecedented six-
decade run. That's Williams’ jazz piano in the original “Peter Gunn”
ions for Mancini, recorded just as he was starting his own career as a
composer but still moonlighting as a top keyboard player for other
composers including Alfred Newman, Elmer Bernstein and Jerry
Goldsmith,
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As Spielberg put it when he presented Williams with the American Film
Institute Life Achievement Award: “Without John Williams, bikes don't
really fly, nor do brooms in Quidditch matches, nor do men in red capes.
There is no Force. Dinosaurs do not walk the earth. We do not wonder, we
do not weep, we do not believe. John, you breathe belief into every film we
have made.”