Omen II

The Royal Concertgebouw must be well racist against Williams!

Has anyone else noticed that E.T. appears to be missing from the basket in the picture above? The poor thing is probably lying squashed on the ground somewhere.

The John Williams Fan Network is proud to premiere for the first time anywhere on the web, the first samples of the Lincoln soundtrack!
http://www.jwfan.com/?p=4950
Enjoy everyone, and please post your thoughts!

On YouTube:

Thanks for posting this, welshslider. I'd gone up the stairs to Bedfordshire long before Williams received his lifetime achievement award. There is a nice clip on YouTube of Nicola Benedetti playing the theme from Schindler's List earlier in the evening, just before Williams received the award for best composer (for the record, he was up against Ennio Morricone and Paul Mealor). Unfortunately the video stops before the award 'presentation', but it's worth watching anyway.
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By the way, the whole programme is available to view on ITV Player at http://www.itv.com/i.../?Filter=326279, but I am not sure if viewers outside the British Empire will be able to view it.

Well, what do you know? I checked with Libby, the LSO's archivist, who confirms that John Williams did indeed conduct the LSO in The Planets at the Barbican in 1982. He conducted two concerts in the Barbican's outdoor Sculpture Court as part of the LSO's summer pops series that year. The concerts included Williams's own film music as well as Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra and Gustav Holst's The Planets. I would be very interested to read Richard's recollections of this 'early' Williams concert.
His first concert with the LSO was at the Royal Albert Hall in February 1978 (when C3PO was famously pictured on the podium), but Williams did not conduct the LSO in concert again between 1982 and 1996.
So there!

Have a word with yourself, Richard!
I have attended many film music concerts with Tommy Pearson presenting and he knows his onions when it comes to film music, make no mistake - he will be presenting the RPO's John Williams concert in October at the Royal Albert Hall, for example (completely sold out, by the way, as is the LSO concert to which Tim refers) and has performed similar duties for the LSO, CBSO, etc. Much as I would have loved to hear Williams quizzed about The Plainsman, Images and Heartbeeps, a) the maestro probably would not remember having scored them and b) most of the Classic FM audience would not have had a clue what they were on about.
I enjoyed the interview very much. I felt that there were enough new insights from Johnny to maintain the interest of the hardcore fans such as us while covering the bases for the casual Classic FM listener, familiar with whatever Williams selections the station deigns to air and no more.

Hello again! I'm pleased to announce that the concert went well, and you can find a few highlights from the performance here (the video is 11:30 total, including the encore). Thank you all for your support!