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Did someone post this yet? New video today, of "Dry Your Tears, Africa" (which sounds tremendously huge in this arrangement). Also Williams looks at least 20 years younger in his conducting energy here, compared to what I've seen lately:

My guess is, it's EpVIII related. 12 timpani seems so over the top, it's most likely for some sort of set piece that will feature them very prominently. This sounds like the kind of orchestrational fun Williams likes to have on occasion, almost like an hommáge to the days of Herrmann-esque or North-ian excess. I can't really think of anyone else working in Hollywood who would have the chops to pull off something so outrageous.

Here's our own @Datameister playing lovely piano solo versions (transcribed by ear!) of some ace JW cues:

Everything sounds great. We're so blessed to be receiving this new recording of classic JW music, all under his baton.

I keep forgetting that in a few months, we'll have a new Star Wars score and (hopefully) a new Spielberg drama score, and (hopefully) another sci-fi score a few months after that!

It's amazing how incredibly easy it would be for Disney to slap the sets together from the resources (With talented mastering and audio engineers probably biting to do so), yet it'll probably never happen. The files are there, on a server, on a hard drive, on a USB, just waiting, and I'm here screaming until I can't breathe at why I can't have that music NOW, not 5-10 years from now! Not releasing filmscores in complete form is like an author removing chapters from a book. "Here's the chapters I like, and you should too, and it might not tell you everything, even missing important details, but it's still better than nothing, right?..."

For those who want the original untouched artwork for Die Hard before Jim Titus' involvement:

Wow, Dry Your Tears, Africa sounds absolutely immense!

We should just be grateful for the fact that we can even discuss new Star Wars music by John Williams in 2017!

I sincerely don't know what to expect from the next SW score, as I like to be surprised. But I know what I'd really love to see again. I was listening to The Force Awakens a few days ago and I was once again so delighted by this cue: It's great to hear Williams blending together the new thematic material with the classic one in such a natural way. It almost seems that the new material has always been part of this musical universe since the beginning. And the classic themes never sound "plastered" forcefully into the fabric of the new score. I guess it takes quite a lot of dexterity and even genius to be able to accomplish such a feat. I very much hope that The Last Jedi will do the same.

Negative:

The best example of this is the music for the jeep ride to the Visitor's Center in Journey To The Island

Yeah the ending was daft, the missus and I lol'd. The perfect way to finish! I'm probably going to watch this again soon.

I hope the second Kingsman film has a similarly 'cheeky' finale to the first ... it apparently offended the sort of humourless idiot unaware/in denial about how virtually every Bond film of the franchise's first 40 years ended.

Yet he has killed his own father..not even Luke or vader could kill each other... anakin neither killed padme...

Yeah...for a subsequent final release that never comes... at least in our lifetimes... They should release at least the scenes that made RO trailers...

This will be it for March. If LLL doesn't have their month locked, they don't do the monthly flier.

The shots in the trailer of the Alien on the ship is comical. Everything that is scary about the Xenomorph is that it's a sneaky little bastard. The 'unknown' and the 'suggested' are far more terrifying than the in-your-face. Alien is insanely terrifying because you are constantly expecting the alien to be somewhere, but you don't know where. And Aliens is more of an action film, yet it is still terrifying because during the action scenes, they just keep coming out of the walls because they bloody look like the walls! They are everywhere, and nowhere at the same time. But in this trailer, there it is, Mr. Charles Xenomorph sat on top of the ship in broad daylight asking for directions and going "GERRR ARRRGH, I'm scary." It's farcical. P.S. I loved Katherine Waterston when I saw her in Fantastic Beasts, so she alone will drag me to see this film, along with my shredded hopes of a decent experience.

I prefer it without teeth.

In this version, he seems to have included multiple choirs (children's, women's, men's) to a higher degree than at least I have heard before. He also alludes to this in the interview. That's what I meant with 'immense'.

The birth of alternative facts!

Damn that'd be cool to have!

I'm extremely surprised I never heard of this. I'm not so sure such a set actually existed. I talked to Jesse Harlin about this once before, and he said that if such a set existed, no one at LucasArts heard about it. He said that for the games, we was given the entire audio mix for the prequels as a Protools project file, and would export mixes from there. That way he was also able to "un-edit" the files, restoring the music to how is was before the mixing took place.

Wow! Is this actually a new arrangement just for this CD? (Sorry if that's actually what all the "immense" comments are referring too, but I thought maybe they were just talking about the performance) It's certainly different than the corresponding OST track. But I'm not familiar with the score beyond that. EDIT: I found a YouTube video with seemingly the same arrangement, being performed at a concert, so I guess this is just the version that JW did for concert performance a while back?

The pacemaker surgery seems to have had a really, REALLY positive effect on his health!

Thanks lol after seeing this I should have recognized the style of it. Walter Murphy has some fun things out there.

I kinda miss novelty records. Anyone remember the "Hooked on Classics" series?

The sheet music for the piano part just says "very low rumble both hands". I have seen this done most commonly on the actual keys, but I've also seen a Boston Pops video where the pianist used percussion mallets to gently roll on the lowest piano strings. Seems to be subject to the musicians' and/or conductor's interpretation.

Grazie, Maurizio! Yes, Usher Hall is a lovely venue and with good acoustics to boot. I did indeed notice this, @Biodome. The low sonorities heard at the opening of the Jaws theme are usually a combination of the harp, low piano and bass drum whenever I have seen the piece played by other orchestras such as the LSO or CBSO. This was the first time I can remember the pianist strumming the lowest register strings rather than touching the keys softly. I would like to think that perhaps Richard Kaufman had some insider knowledge from the original sessions that he was able to share with the orchestra. I am glad you enjoyed your first John Williams concert. You certainly picked a good one to start with! Make sure you get a ticket to Raiders of the Lost Ark live with the RSNO when they go on sale tomorrow. I saw it in London last year and it was superb.

I think I have the recording sessions for Star Wars episode 9 laying around in my cellar somewhere.

Yep. And Covenant looks like a remake of Prometheus. So a remake of a remake!

No one criticizes Prometheus because it tried to do something different. It didn't. It was the same old routine again.

You compare this to Alien? Only at JWfan! Compared to this, Alien feels like a esoteric art movie, the real deal. Covenant looks and feels like SyFy doing a dumb Alien ripoff. I see nothing great or intriguing in the trailer. Quite the opposite.

There's a difference between "approaching the ALIEN films as character films" (I don't think anybody does that) and watching them because, among other things, one enjoys the characters. But yes, the characters are absolutely vital in the first two films.

Actually, I'm not so sure that we can count out this possibility. George Lucas has said this about his sequel trilogy (most of these comments were made a while ago - 80s, I think - and Lucas may well have revised his ideas significantly since, but you'd think a lot of the basics still remained when he handed his short sequel trilogy treatment to Disney a few years ago). And early in the Force Awakens concept art book, there's a painting of a "Jedi killer" (which evolved into Kylo Ren) holding a lightsaber with one end blue and the other red, showing the struggle between light and dark. While of course Lucas has claimed that his story ideas were thrown out, that's not true according to Pablo Hidalgo of the Lucasfilm Story Group - rather, the treatment was used as a starting point for continued development (for instance, he has said it was Lucas' idea to have the trilogy be about a young woman who wants to become a Jedi). So it's plausible that this theme of moral ambiguity could have carried into the final films that are being made, and specifically into Kylo Ren's character (I was reading a complaint about how Kylo Ren was too "on the verge" and not clearly evil enough once, and it just kind of clicked that maybe, just maybe, this could be a major theme of the trilogy, one that came from Lucas' treatment). Or this could still be a theme of the trilogy even if Lucasfilm came up with it entirely independently of Lucas, who knows. Obviously this is all somewhat wild speculation, of course, but that's the fun of being a Star Wars fan.

I never really minded it. It still works great as an album experience for me.

A thirty-minute tribute culled from various interviews:

I'm messaging him asking for him to send a sample. If he doesn't, then I'll assume it's fake, as I already do. Those are not real session leaks. They're just fan edits using video game and DVD rips. The sessions NEVER leaked onto the internet, not yet anyway.

The music of John Williams and Friends Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Richard Kaufman Usher Hall, Edinburgh Friday 24th February 2017 Like Hogmanay and the Edinburgh Festival, it is becoming something of an annual tradition in Scotland for Richard Kaufman to conduct the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in the music of John Williams, so when a new concert was announced in the RSNO’s 2016-17 schedule entitled ‘John Williams and Friends’, to be performed four times over three days in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee, I decided that I would finally make the effort to be there at one of the concerts. So it was that this Sassenach found himself on a chilly Friday evening in a sold out Usher Hall, Edinburgh’s opulent Edwardian concert hall, four hundred miles from home and wondering whether the long train journey and expense would be worth the effort. There are several reasons why I should not have worried. Firstly the RSNO would be led by the reliable American conductor Richard Kaufman, a personal friend of John Williams who in a nine-year career as a Hollywood studio violinist played on several of the maestro’s soundtracks, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Eiger Sanction. His friendship and close working relationship with Williams have given him access to rarely played Williams scores that would be out of the reach of many other orchestras and conductors. Secondly, the RSNO has recorded several John Williams albums including less well known scores such as Midway and Amazing Stories, landmark recordings that gave film music fans the opportunity to hear those scores in all their glory several years before the original soundtracks were released by specialist labels. Quite apart from that, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra is the best orchestra in Scotland and one of the best in Europe, while Scotland’s capital city is well worth a visit any time of the year (if a trip to Edinburgh Castle is not on your bucket list, it should be). The concert began in spectacular style with Summon the Heroes, written for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and not heard in concert nearly as often as it should be. Indeed I realised that I had not heard it played live since I saw John Williams himself conduct the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican as long ago as 1996 - it was the first time I ever saw my musical hero. The RSNO more than did him justice, with three of the trumpeters stood off stage behind the orchestra, an unexpected if noisy treat for the audience members in the choir seats. Afterwards maestro Kaufman joked, “That was your ballad for the evening” before promising that the orchestra would play some “more exciting” pieces later on! A fellow audience member was overheard explaining to his companion that the piece was written for the Los Angeles Olympics in 1990, somehow managing to get both the venue and the year completely wrong. Mate, the programmes cost only a quid. Next up was Hymn to the Fallen from the end credits of Saving Private Ryan, the trumpet duo played brilliantly by RSNO principal Chris Hart (as he did in the first piece) and Marcus Pope, replicating the sound of Tim Morrison and Thomas Rolfs from the original soundtrack. While there was no choir, it was a great opportunity to hear live the RSNO’s top class brass section so familiar to film music fans. This would be followed by another first for me, a performance of the concert version of Jim’s New Life from another Spielberg film, Empire of the Sun. In the film the music accompanies a scene in which Jim (Christian Bale) carries out a number of errands in a Japanese internment camp. Kaufman took the piece at a good tempo, much closer to that of the film version and certainly quicker than the tempo that John Williams often conducts it. Dare I say that a quicker tempo improves this fine scherzo? This was followed by the first of two pieces not composed by John Williams that we would hear this evening, Maurice Jarre’s Overture from Lawrence of Arabia. The piece owed its welcome inclusion in the concert to the fact that David Lean’s epic had been a great inspiration to Steven Spielberg in his formative years. The percussion section earned their corn in this one, especially timpani player John Poulter who must have relished the chance to perform those bombastic opening bars penned by a composer whose primary instrument was the kettle drums. The remainder of the first half really showcased the diversity of John Williams, starting with an outstanding performance of the concert version of The People’s House from Spielberg’s biopic Lincoln. I am a sucker for that Coplandesque Americana that John Williams does so well in this score. Again the gorgeous trumpet solo was played flawlessly by principal Chris Hart, who fully deserved the audience’s ovation afterwards. The Duel from The Adventures of Tintin was another concert first for me, Kaufman explaining that it was one of several pieces that are not usually available for orchestras to perform but that John Williams had been gracious enough to lend him from his personal library. Williams famously conducted the piece at the Hollywood Bowl to an on-screen montage of famous sword fights from movie history featuring the swashbuckling likes of Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Stewart Granger and, erm, Kermit the Frog, but the music is more than capable of holding its own without the aid of visual images. It was good to see the string players acknowledged afterwards by conductor Kaufman who no doubt empathised as a fellow violinist familiar with the challenges of playing a John Williams film cue, especially one so frenetic in nature. The penultimate piece before the interval may well have been the highlight of the evening for me. The theme from the Richard Dreyfuss / Holly Hunter weepy Always is hardly ever played in concert and was another piece specially loaned by the composer for the RSNO concerts. Pianist Lynda Cochrane and guest principal horn player Andrew McLean deserve particular credit for their performances in a version identical to that recorded for Sony Classical’s Spielberg / Williams Collaboration CD in 1990. Taking us into the interval was the Flying Theme from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, always a popular choice at Williams concerts even if I was spoiled by the live to picture performance by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra just after Christmas. Beginning the second half of the concert was the legendary shark theme from Jaws, the first Williams score on which tonight’s conductor had performed as a studio musician. As is often the case, the opening string chord was accompanied by nervous laughter from many in the audience, in much the same way that Bernard Herrmann’s music for the shower scene in Psycho is now seemingly cause for mirth and merriment rather than terror. It was a punchy, exciting performance and a bonus to see it conducted by someone who had played on the original sessions way back in 1975. Unlike in the original sessions however, I did not see any of the violinists covering their eyes because they were too scared to watch the film! Tuba player John Whitener was invited to take a bow afterwards. Any concert tribute to John Williams and Steven Spielberg must include music from an Indiana Jones film and here we had Marion’s Theme in addition to the ubiquitous but always brilliant Raiders March from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Williams arranged the former fairly recently, around the time of the disappointing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a concert version of the theme for Karen Allen’s feisty heroine in the original movie. The RSNO’s performance of the Raiders March sounded probably as close to the London Symphony Orchestra’s film version as I have heard it played. There was further applause when maestro Kaufman hinted afterwards that there would be a special announcement regarding Raiders of the Lost Ark and the RSNO that we would not want to miss. I think you can guess what it is! It was interesting to see alto saxophonist Simon Haram again reprising Closing In, the first movement of the three-part concert suite Escapades that Williams adapted from his Catch Me If You Can score. He had performed the same piece with the Philharmonia Orchestra down in London at the Royal Festival Hall just a few weeks ago in their Spielberg at 70 tribute concert, so is obviously one of the go to guys when an alto saxophone is needed. It is always fun to watch the orchestra members’ finger clicking and ‘shushing’ whenever this piece is played in concert. The second and final non-Williams selection was Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme, the Williams connection being that he had played the piano on the original soundtrack recording. This was enormous fun, with several of the RSNO musicians giving extended improvised solos, most notably principal trombone Davur Juul Magnussen who I can safely say is the only trombonist I have ever seen from the Faroe Islands. As I left Usher Hall after the concert I overheard a fellow concertgoer asking her husband, who was humming the Peter Gunn theme, “Was that Dragnet? Or The Thin Man?” [Insert face palm gif of your choice here]. This was followed by the European premiere of Flight and Technology, the final movement of John Williams’s American Journey suite adapted from his score for the Spielberg short film The Unfinished Journey premiered at the millennium celebrations at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Maestro Kaufman related how when sharing conducting duties with Williams at last year’s Tanglewood Film Night he had wondered whether it would be appropriate to include any of John Williams's music in his half of the concert, to which Williams had responded, “No, you should - that’s why they’re coming!” You see, the “I know, but they’re all dead” one liner is not the only gag in John Williams’s repertoire, the man’s a funny guy. As a tribute to the late Carrie Fisher, the concert ended with the only Williams selection not written for a film directed by Steven Spielberg, the Throne Room and End Title from Star Wars. The rapturous applause that greeted the final notes subsided only when Richard Kaufman turned to the orchestra to give us a little something extra from the Dark Side, the Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back. All in all this was a five star concert and I would love to return some day if Edinburgh will have me back!

I think they were dead on for the parts and for what the filmmakers wanted to achieve. Here is an example for what is in my opinion a less successful cast: Sunshine If I'm not convinced that this is an actual crew on board of a spaceship then the movie is never going to be as good as it could be.

Well, I could argue that in Alien the design is central but it helped that the characters were fully convincing. Characters are an important part of an experience. For instance, if the character feels 'out of place' or 'wrong for the part', then the experience or the cinematic immersion is simply not going to be as good as it could be. Everything is aesthetics, Thor, even characters. Their appearance, a pose, a facial expression, a gesture, ... It's all part of a film's mise-en-scène. If something about them is off then the tableau is damaged.

Why does it contradict the canon? The ship in Prometheus is brand new and part of a well funded scientific mission. The Nostromo is essentially an old freighter hauling cargo across the universe. The cast in Alien, like the ship they operated looked lived in. All of they had very charismatic, faces but none of them were typical Hollywood star types. You could meet people like Ash or Dallas working in a local factory.

Yep, copying and recycling. It's a (poor) attempt to recreate the spontaneous blue collar atmosphere of the dinner scene in Alien. But I can't stand the green lighting and the piano music which is only there not to alienate modern audiences. I already ordered a new set of foam bricks. Yes, Thor will think it's brilliant but to the rest of us it's copying and recycling. Maybe it's just some viral thingy.

It's not on Spotify, but for we brave few who use Google Play Music to stream music it is there: https://play.google.com/music/listen?authuser#/album/Bufqcenzfcxmwzzrbs3ry3zoj6m/Filmharmonic+Brass/Filmharmonic+Brass+Plays+John+Williams I thought the brass arrangement of the Jurassic Park theme was very lovely here. I was very happy to hear "Anakin's Theme," which is such a beautiful piece but one of if not the least played Star Wars concert arrangement.

Is it because it's filmed with a handheld camera holding a 12mm lens that people think it's art and not just another romantic movie?

Indeed. And this is exactly what Inferno and On Stranger Tides suffered from.

Zimmer going completely on auto-pilot and doing a score just for the money is the Zimmer I'm not interested in. An auto-pilot Goldsmith or Horner score could still be a fun listen. With Zimmer they are just pointless.