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I just got back from this concert at the Hollywood Bowl, with John Williams conducting the LA Philharmonic. In addition to the scheduled program (which featured the SW theme and the Indiana Jones theme, among his more notable compositions), he did an impromptu en core featuring the Imperial March, Yoda's Theme, and the full-length version of The Mission, the music he composed in the late 1980s for NBC News (which has never once been broadcast in its entirety-the most of it you'll hear today is on Meet The Press).

His orchestration of Yoda's Theme was particularly interesting, with a slightly slower tempo and a bit more lushness making for a rather more dramatic presentation than what you hear in the soundtrack. The Imperial March rendition was more or less standard.

Other highlights of the concert included John Williams inadvertantly picking his nose while the camera (the video feed of which is projected on several screens and LCD monitors located around the Hollywood Bowl) was trained on him while conducting the waltz from Madame Bovarie, watching some die-hard Warsie fanboy pretend he was conducting Yoda's theme with his fake lightsabre (there were about 50 warsies with faux lightsabres, although mercifully they kept them dimmed through most of the concert), and a bat flying straight at me (narrowly missing my face!) while John Williams conducted The Mission.

My regret is the bat did not make his move when Williams was conducting the Imperial March, as I would have felt inspired to grab it and crush it while shouting "Now you will experience the full power of the dark side!"

There is a repeat of the concert tomorrow night, so any LA-based sd.netters might want to see if any tickets are still availible.

That's awesome; I was about to go to that concert this year and then it fell through at the last minute. This is a yearly thing though, so anyone who missed it can try to make it next year, around the same time.

Christ. I wish I lived in Los Angeles. John Williams is a fucking genius. No one can match his composition skills. Among my favorite soundtracks that he composed are from Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich, and of course, the first three Harry Potter films.

I never got around to seeing Memoirs, was it any good?

And, I thought the Harry Potter soundtracks were not up to his other work. Maybe it's just me, but I always thought he was doing those sort of to just wait until SW ep 3 came up. Munich was good though, and Schindler's List was one of his best.

Before you rush to the conclusion that "no one can match John Williams (composing skills), it's worth noting that Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev not only heavily influenced him, but in terms of the sheer technical brilliance of their compositions, arguably whipped his ass. The Star Wars theme, for instance, owes a rather large debt to the Arabic Dance from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. That said, John Williams is brilliant nonetheless, and certainly one of the top two film score composers to date (the other being Maurice Jarre, who did the scores for such blow-away films as Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Ghost).

Additionally, I should also point out that John Williams has a tendancy to engage in extreme podium theatrics, to the extent that he rivals Herbert von Karajan (who had a special raised podium installed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York so that the audience could see him conduct-something not really customary at many operas). I personally prefer to watch an extremely reserved, no-nonsense approach to conducting, in which the conductor remains as still as possible and makes only such movements as are neccessary to communicate to the musicians what he or she wants them to do, as the result, by virtue of its sheer functionality, looks cool. John Williams isn't nearly as bad in that respect as some conductors, who dance around the podium and swing their butt in time to the music, but he still does it to a large extent.

When I said "composition skills", I was referring to the soundtracks he has put together. I know that he is no Mozart, Beethoven, or Chopin.

Well technically, composition skills implies that you are referring to how good a composer he is. Perhaps "compilation skills" is a better fit for what you were trying to project?