I T   I S   H A R D   to think of a composer whose music so immediately transports us to another world than John Williams.  The first bar of a brass fanfare whisks us to long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.  A soaring melody in swelling strings sends us cycling across the moon.  And have two alternating notes ever been more terrifying than that ominous tremor coming off the coast, sailing through the salt spray of New England?

       For more than half a century, Williams has not only developed the soundscape of many of Hollywood’s most beloved franchises — as well as the Olympics, Presidential inaugurations, and so much more.  His music has become a constant thread running through our collective culture, a kind of harmonized language for monumental, everyday events.  

       For this Labor Day holiday weekend, the seemingly indefatigable composer deservedly gets top billing with A Salute to John Williams featuring The Cleveland Orchestra.

       Conductor Richard Kaufman, who’s played violin on six of the composer’s soundtracks (including Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), takes us on a musical journey through Williams’s iconic Hollywood scores. Here we’ll visit the familiar halls of Hogwarts, join a search for the lost Ark of the Covenant, and wrestle with the horrors and heroismin the Krakow Jewish Ghetto during World War II.

       With 51 Academy Award nominations (only Walt Disney has more) and five Oscars, Williams is arguably the most successful composer of film scores in history.  Yet he freely admits to benefiting from a favorable perch on the shoulders of past giants.  Williams got his start as a young man working for legendary composers Alfred Newman (All About Eve) and Bernard Herrmann (Psycho).  They in turn could credit European-born composers including Erich Korngold and Max Steiner, who expanded the scope of movie music to operatic heights.  And, lest we forget, all of them derived a vocabulary of orchestral writing from classical composers, whose dramatic work in a time before movies pointed the way toward new visual imagining.  What would we be listening to (with our popcorn!) without Beethoven, Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Holst?!  Through this ongoing chain of masterful collaboration and shared evolution, Williams forged his own path, bringing uncompromised musical skill and an innate sense of theatricality and drama to the silver screen.

       In 2016, Williams received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute.  In presenting him with the honor, director Stephen Spielberg encapsulated why Williams’s music means so much:  “Without John Williams, bikes don’t really fly, nor do brooms and 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 breathes] belief into every film we have made.”

—Amanda Angel