The Wall Street Journal
The celebrated film composer’s new work, which had its premiere at the idyllic Massachusetts venue this weekend in a performance by Emanuel Ax and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, deftly highlights his artistry away from the silver screen.
Composers of film scores who aspire to the concert hall have it rough. Fans from the multiplex want tunes they can hum, while classical-music aficionados tend to regard composers who earn studio paychecks as inferior to those who don’t. Yet such snobbery is not entirely misplaced, as several Hollywood composers have made ill-fated attempts to augment their mainstream success with the patina of “serious” music.
The obvious exception is John Williams, arguably the greatest and certainly the most commercially successful composer of music for movies ever. In addition to his Hollywood triumphs with Steven Spielberg and others, Mr. Williams has proved a hit in the concert hall. His works for violin and orchestra have been composed for world-class artists like Anne-Sophie Mutter and Gil Shaham, and his Cello Concerto was written for Yo-Yo Ma.
On Saturday, Mr. Williams notched another such achievement: the premiere of his Piano Concerto, dedicated to Emanuel Ax, a soloist equally renowned for interpretive sympathy and technical acumen. As with the violin and cello works, the first performance was given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, ensconced as usual this time of year at Tanglewood, its summer home since 1937. The conductor was the orchestra’s music director, Andris Nelsons, who just completed his 11th season in the job. Mr. Williams is no stranger to this prestigious al fresco festival; he conducted the Boston Pops here from 1980 to 1993, succeeding the legendary Arthur Fiedler in that role. And he remains a beloved presence on this vast and verdant campus, as the overwhelming audience reaction to his appearance on stage Saturday attested.
Mr. Williams’s new 21-minute concerto—which will enjoy a run of four performances in Boston with the same forces in January—does not have a catchy title like “TreeSong,” the violin concerto in all but name he wrote for Mr. Shaham in 2000. But the program indicates that the work’s three discrete movements are nods to the great jazz pianists Art Tatum, Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson. The composer, whose father was a jazz drummer, is a pianist himself, so he comes by such connections honestly. Yet the jazz aspects of the piece are not especially obvious.
Instead, I felt the concerto, scored for a large and colorful orchestra and featuring novel couplings, had a strong universal narrative that moved from near desolation to triumph, with several diverting episodes in between. It opens boldly, for the piano alone, with no time signatures, so Mr. Ax, now age 76, played freely. That changed once the orchestra entered and the perennial struggle of group versus individual unfolded—though in later passages some members of the orchestra were briefly afforded similar liberties.
The work has many appealing aspects, not least that it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Understandably for a man well into his tenth decade, Mr. Williams wishes to get straight to the point. Modernists like Charles Ives and Alban Berg are clearly invoked but never oppressively, while some rhythms in the finale struck me as straight from Dvořák’s playbook.
But the concerto’s high point must be the opening of the second movement, in which a solo viola (BSO principal Steven Ansell on this occasion) spins a lachrymose melody that is soon joined by the questing solo piano. Once entwined, the music quickly becomes a love duet, which then gradually expands as other instruments enter. The end of the third movement will also have its fans, especially those who cherish Mr. Williams’s film work, for it is a hell-for-leather orchestral coda in the mode of Beethoven that rises in intensity until a thwack from the bass drum tells us we’re done—as if we didn’t know!
Mr. Ax, typically, made the whole affair seem natural, even as some of what he was asked to do would daunt a much younger player. And Mr. Nelsons and the orchestra, sounding splendid throughout, offered that rarest of gifts—the ability to arrest a listener’s attention without at all detracting from the soloist’s efforts.
The evening offered no curtain raiser, but the concerto was followed, post-intermission, by a riveting account of Mahler’s lately ubiquitous Symphony No. 1. Paradoxically, the performance, except in climaxes, exuded languor. Yet by emphasizing cohesion as much as atmosphere, Mr. Nelsons held the melodic line so tautly that focus never flagged. And only an orchestra as fine as this one could have produced the elegant sonic glow he elicited.
Mr. Williams’s contributions to Hollywood will long survive him. Whether his classical scores have that sort of staying power is unclear. But the best of them, including this latest work—which Mr. Ax and the New York Philharmonic will perform in late February and early March—possess a broad appeal that any music lover can embrace.
