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    John Williams in the Concert Hall: An Introduction

    Listen to five works that Hollywood’s reigning composer has written for symphony orchestras and star soloists like Yo-Yo Ma.John Williams has been Hollywood’s leading composer for over half a century. A keeper of the Golden Age flame of soaring grandeur and indelible melodies, he is the musical mind behind the two-note terror of “Jaws,” the operatic fanfare of “Star Wars” and the mischievous charm of “Harry Potter” — along with the sounds of some 50 other Academy Award-nominated scores.Over the years, Williams has also maintained a robust career in the concert hall. But while his soundtracks are the stuff of cultural immortality, his symphonic works have never found a foothold in the repertory. Even now, as his music is programmed by the storied ensembles of Vienna and Berlin, it’s more likely to be “E.T.” than his “Essay for Strings.”Williams’s concert works tend to be skillful but less imaginative than his film scores. And some — particularly pièces d’occasion like the larky “Soundings,” written for the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003 — are understandably obscure. At his best, though, he is a vivid tone painter with a masterly command of orchestration and form. Here are five examples.Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1976)Reminiscent at times of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto and, like it, written in the wake of loss — for Williams, the sudden death of his wife — this entry into the genre moves fluidly, and often unpredictably, in and out of lyricism, volatility and breathlessness. Premiered in 1981 by Mark Peskanov, it found a broader audience when recorded three decades later by Gil Shaham and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with which Williams has a long association.‘The Five Sacred Trees’ (1993)More or less a bassoon concerto, this commission for the New York Philharmonic’s 150th anniversary opens with a long solo that conjures the first (and wisest) of five trees from Celtic mythology. The movements that follow are arboreal portraits in music: a puckish, dancing duet for the bassoon and a violin; a mysterious nocturne; curlicue phrases choked into fragments; and patient brooding.Cello Concerto (1994)Williams composed this for Yo-Yo Ma to inaugurate Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood. (Among Williams’s works for the instrument, it has aged better than Three Pieces for Solo Cello, a 2001 meditation on Black history with titles like “Pickin’.”) Tailored to its soloist like a film score to its scenes, the concerto is designed to reflect different angles of Ma’s artistry: as a heroic virtuoso, a nimble genre-hopper and, in the ruminative finale, an expressive communicator.Horn Concerto (2003)Dale Clevenger — the Chicago Symphony Orchestra horn master for whom this was written, and who died last month — once told an interviewer that he had requested an “audience-friendly” concerto from Williams. The result is difficult to play yet often warm, while also being nearly programmatic in its succession of tone poems that verge on the Coplandesque in the third-movement Pastorale.‘Markings’ (2017)If this atmospheric and discursive work seems like the start of something larger, it kind of is. Written at the urging of the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, and leaning into her trademark eloquence, it was the first in a series of collaborations that have since included an album of Williams’s film music arranged for her and orchestra, as well as his Second Violin Concerto, which premiered last year and comes to Carnegie Hall in April. More

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    Review: An Orchestra Offers a Novel View of Music History

    At Carnegie Hall, Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now took an always-needed step in uncovering overlooked American classical music.Pity the 19th-century American composer, toiling away in the shadow of Beethoven in search of a homegrown sound, only to be overshadowed by yet another European: Antonin Dvorak, whose “New World” Symphony is played far more often than anything from the New World that preceded it.Visiting the United States in the 1890s, Dvorak prophesied a future of American classical music founded on Black and Indigenous melodies. To an extent, that came true in the 20th century, but orchestras tended to overlook composers of color in favor of white, male ones — some of whom would come to be seen as national heroes, while their lesser-known compatriots would rely (and continue to rely) on passionate champions.And Europeans still haunted concert programming — a product, the historian Joseph Horowitz has asserted, of a cultural shift in American classical music from a focus on composers to performers that, fueled by the rise of radio broadcasts and recordings, calcified the repertoire of our largest cultural institutions.I’m being reductive, but the broad truth of this is that the myopic approach of much orchestral programming today — Eurocentric, with living composers rarely given the same pride of place as a Beethoven or Mahler — is nothing new.Then there are artists like Leon Botstein, an indispensable advocate of the unfairly ignored, who brought his ensemble The Orchestra Now to Carnegie Hall on Thursday for an evening of works that, despite covering a range of nearly 150 years, felt as fresh as a batch of premieres.Botstein belongs to a class of conductors and artistic directors — including Horowitz, as well as Gil Rose of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Ashleigh Gordon and Anthony R. Green of Castle of Our Skins, and more — who bring an endlessly curious and almost archaeological mind to their programming. They operate on such a small scale, they can hardly reverse the course of American classical music history; but each concert, each recording, is an essential step in a better direction.Leon Botstein, left, led the program, which included a new concerto by Scott Wheeler for the violinist Gil Shaham.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesOn Thursday, Botstein and The Orchestra Now, a capable and game group of young musicians, took the latest of those steps with Julia Perry’s “Stabat Mater,” written in 1951, early in that composer’s short life; Scott Wheeler’s new violin concerto, “Birds of America,” featuring Gil Shaham; and George Frederick Bristow’s Fourth Symphony, “Arcadian,” from 1872.Perry’s work, an episodic setting of the classic Latin text that has inspired composers for centuries, seems to rise from the depths, awakening slowly with the sounds of gravelly cellos that eventually give away to the brightness of a solo violin and the entrance of the vocalist: here, the mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter, who navigated her part’s surprising turns and plunges with smooth and characterful ease.The score, like many American works from the mid-20th century, strikes a balance of dissonance and tonality. With a brief running time and modest scale, it is nonetheless dense, with thick textures emerging from its all-string ensemble and an affecting ambivalence in the final section of instrumental darkness and vocal ecstasy.Wheeler’s likable concerto, which the orchestra premiered last weekend at the Fisher Center at Bard College, has elements of timelessness — its lyricism akin to that of Barber and Korngold’s famous violin concertos — but also postmodernism, with snippets of classics like Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.”Despite the avian title, Wheeler doesn’t emulate birdsong as Messiaen famously did, but he does take inspiration from the calls of distinct voices, with brief, repeated phrases attached to specific instruments — such as the whistling runs from a piccolo and flute that open the piece.Shaham, one of our sunniest violinists, entered accordingly with a singing melody on his highest string, and brought abundant warmth throughout. But he was also grippingly virtuosic in tricky, Sarasate-like passages of lyrical double-stops and left-hand pizzicato. In the finale, he engaged in a musical Simon Says, knocking on the back of his instrument and cuing the second violins to do the same, then setting up col legno tapping in the violas and high-pitched bird calls in the first violins. By the end, the winds joined in to evoke a wondrously bustling aviary.The evening ended with a rare reading of George Frederick Bristow’s “Arcadian” Symphony.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesWithout an intermission, Botstein continued with Bristow’s burly symphony, one of those works that is more heard about than actually heard. But when it premiered, in the midst of 19th-century debates about the direction of American classical music — documented, with an analysis of the “Arcadian,” in the musicologist Douglas W. Shadle’s revelatory 2015 book “Orchestrating the Nation” — it enjoyed the rare success of repeated programming.And on Thursday, you could hear why. With late-Romantic grandeur and American inspiration, the “Arcadian,” played at Carnegie in a new edition by Kyle Gann, charts an imagined journey westward with a changing musical landscape; a serene pause that conjures communal entertainment with a quote from Tallis’s “Evening Hymn”; a troublingly naïve and chauvinistic “Indian War Dance” that’s more of a European danse macabre; and a festive celebration upon arrival.As a document of history, it is an embodiment, ripe for interrogation, of Manifest Destiny’s sins. But as music, Bristow’s score holds its own alongside European Romanticism while transparently aiming for a new, more distinct path. He was hardly alone in this effort. There was a moment when New York’s concert halls resounded with 19th-century American symphonies. It’s time they did again.The Orchestra NowPerformed Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More