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I don't know what you're all going on about. This is absolutely and unquestionably the best live recording of a John Williams concert in the history of John Williams concerts. Who cares if they mess up a couple of seconds of the Star Wars Main Title if they immediately make up for it by playing the best rendition of the theme ever. I would consider most of the pieces in this album to be the best recordings, some of them even more emotionally moving than the clean, studio-recorded OST versions. God, how amazing the Flight to Neverland, Close Encounters, E.T., The Rebellion is Reborn, and The Imperial March performances are! There are simply no equals to those!
 
You can all go nitpicking the pieces if you want, of course, who am I to stop you, but for me, this is the most precious musical memory of the 25 years of my life, and I can't thank John Williams and Wiener Philharmoniker enough for making it accessible on demand in every possible format, so that I can re-experience it whenever I desire.

I don't know what you're all going on about. This is absolutely and unquestionably the best live recording of a John Williams concert in the history of John Williams concerts. Who cares if they mess up a couple of seconds of the Star Wars Main Title if they immediately make up for it by playing the best rendition of the theme ever. I would consider most of the pieces in this album to be the best recordings, some of them even more emotionally moving than the clean, studio-recorded OST versions. God, how amazing the Flight to Neverland, Close Encounters, E.T., The Rebellion is Reborn, and The Imperial March performances are! There are simply no equals to those!
 
You can all go nitpicking the pieces if you want, of course, who am I to stop you, but for me, this is the most precious musical memory of the 25 years of my life, and I can't thank John Williams and Wiener Philharmoniker enough for making it accessible on demand in every possible format, so that I can re-experience it whenever I desire.

I don't know what you're all going on about. This is absolutely and unquestionably the best live recording of a John Williams concert in the history of John Williams concerts. Who cares if they mess up a couple of seconds of the Star Wars Main Title if they immediately make up for it by playing the best rendition of the theme ever. I would consider most of the pieces in this album to be the best recordings, some of them even more emotionally moving than the clean, studio-recorded OST versions. God, how amazing the Flight to Neverland, Close Encounters, E.T., The Rebellion is Reborn, and The Imperial March performances are! There are simply no equals to those!
 
You can all go nitpicking the pieces if you want, of course, who am I to stop you, but for me, this is the most precious musical memory of the 25 years of my life, and I can't thank John Williams and Wiener Philharmoniker enough for making it accessible on demand in every possible format, so that I can re-experience it whenever I desire.

What I am looking for in an album, is, first and foremost, the subjective experience. The technical stuff does matter, but so does the emotion with which the orchestra plays, the timbre of each instrument, and how well it resonates within the hall, and, let's face it, for classical concerts, there is no better acoustic environment in the world than the Großer Saal.
 
I don't listen to these kinds of albums with the score in my hands, meticulously checking if all the notes match up. I listen to these albums lying on the couch, with eyes closed, and volume turned up, so it feels like I am there. This album is able to bring me to tears, which rarely happens with other recordings. Of course, the fact that I was there plays a big part in that as well. As I said, it's a subjective experience; I don't feel the need to take the role of an examiner.

I appreciate the rarely performed pieces they chose there, but no, the album doesn't come close to the grandeur of the Vienna concert recording.

I don't know what you're all going on about. This is absolutely and unquestionably the best live recording of a John Williams concert in the history of John Williams concerts. Who cares if they mess up a couple of seconds of the Star Wars Main Title if they immediately make up for it by playing the best rendition of the theme ever. I would consider most of the pieces in this album to be the best recordings, some of them even more emotionally moving than the clean, studio-recorded OST versions. God, how amazing the Flight to Neverland, Close Encounters, E.T., The Rebellion is Reborn, and The Imperial March performances are! There are simply no equals to those!
 
You can all go nitpicking the pieces if you want, of course, who am I to stop you, but for me, this is the most precious musical memory of the 25 years of my life, and I can't thank John Williams and Wiener Philharmoniker enough for making it accessible on demand in every possible format, so that I can re-experience it whenever I desire.

I don't know what you're all going on about. This is absolutely and unquestionably the best live recording of a John Williams concert in the history of John Williams concerts. Who cares if they mess up a couple of seconds of the Star Wars Main Title if they immediately make up for it by playing the best rendition of the theme ever. I would consider most of the pieces in this album to be the best recordings, some of them even more emotionally moving than the clean, studio-recorded OST versions. God, how amazing the Flight to Neverland, Close Encounters, E.T., The Rebellion is Reborn, and The Imperial March performances are! There are simply no equals to those!
 
You can all go nitpicking the pieces if you want, of course, who am I to stop you, but for me, this is the most precious musical memory of the 25 years of my life, and I can't thank John Williams and Wiener Philharmoniker enough for making it accessible on demand in every possible format, so that I can re-experience it whenever I desire.

Come on... Why do I have the impression that after the concerts everyone was delighted? This is a live recording - minor flaws are acceptable, and fortunately I hardly hear them. I don't mind the slower pace here and there, and even if the orchestra is a bit off the pace at the start of the Star Wars Main Title, it's not something that would bother me. The performances are fantastic, the sound is perfect, but knowing that these concerts gave Williams and people gathered at Musikverein great joy is priceless. Blu-ray gave me a lot of emotions that reminded me of what I felt during those two wonderful days in January. And I know that I will come back to this concert very often and always with great pleasure. Thank You John Williams, Thank you Wiener Philharmoniker. 

You kids! So demanding nowadays, with all your gadgets and your trinkets, your HD and your stereo! You’re never happy!

For me, Stravinsky is the go-to composer whenever I want to listen to John Williams without actually listening to John Williams.
 
Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich are pretty big inspirations as well. Holst, too, especially for the Star Wars scores.

The human ear isn't lossless!

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/interview-john-williams-at-89-the-man-behind-the-best-and-most-hummable-film-scores-6z32zqz3h
 
Interview: John Williams at 89, the man behind the best (and most hummable) film scores
The composer tells Richard Morrison about his decades-long career — including the time he helped out a struggling LSO with ‘some sci‑fi film’
 
He left it late, but in January this year John Williams added another achievement to a body of work that includes more than 100 film scores, dozens of symphonic works and 52 Academy award nominations. Just a few weeks shy of his 88th birthday he made his conducting debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in the ornately gilded Golden Hall of the Musikverein.
 
The concert, filmed and recorded by Deutsche Grammophon and released next week, was remarkable for several reasons. According to Williams, this venerable orchestra had never played a note of his music before. It certainly made up for lost time, delivering extracts from more than a dozen of Williams’s greatest scores, including Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Harry Potter films, Jurassic Park, ET, Jaws and Schindler’s List.
 
And the Viennese musicians weren’t the only ones venturing into unfamiliar territory. “Although I’ve done a lot of concert work in America, I had never conducted publicly in Europe before,” Williams admits, speaking down the phone from his Los Angeles home. “And I never really intended to. It always seemed a long way from California. When this invitation came, however, I thought, ‘Well, if I’m ever to conduct a concert in Europe in this lifetime, I’d better get on with it.’ And there’s no greater honour than being invited to conduct in the Musikverein.”
 
Was Williams aware of the history of the hall as he walked out on to that famous platform? After all, in his remarks from the conductor’s podium he referred to his soundtracks for the Star Wars films — all nine of them — as “a nice round number”, a remark clearly picked up by the Viennese audience as an allusion to the number of symphonies written by Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler and Bruckner.
 
“Absolutely,” he replies. “For any composer, to visit Vienna is a spiritual journey. It’s as much of a Mecca as we musicians have. Especially if, like me, you revere Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler. Just the chance to breathe the same air as Haydn — one of the purest, most instinctive talents in the history of music — was more than I could resist.”
 
Which of those composers would Williams most liked to have met? “Oh, Beethoven of course,” Williams says. “I still read through his scores for the pleasure of what I hear in my head, and for the beauty I find in their craftsmanship. And I think he might have been interested in film if he’d lived 200 years later, though he probably would have been horrified by having his music drowned out by the noise of spaceships flying past.”
 
And how did the Vienna Philharmonic take to Williams’s epic film scores? “They rose to the challenge brilliantly,” the composer says. “To be honest, I was a bit concerned before I got there. I know they have this fabulous romantic sound, and they can seem to turn on 19th-century style more genuinely than any other orchestra — but I had worries about the rotary valve trumpets [a more old-fashioned form of trumpet, still favoured in German and Austrian orchestras]. I was concerned about so much upper-register work being played by trumpets without the sort of pistons we use in Britain and America. I need not have worried, though: the trumpets were fabulous. Their pitching and power blew me away.”
 
Hearing music from so many films and decades collected together on one recording makes one appreciate the protean nature of Williams’s genius. There is no single “Williams style”. Yes, the swaggering imperial marches of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark might be regarded as a hallmark, but so might the spooky, bitonal shifts of the Harry Potter score, or the relentless Prokofiev-like ostinatos of Jaws, or the uneasy Vaughan Williams-like pastoralism of War Horse, or the Yiddish melancholy of Schindler’s List. Does Williams recognise this aspect of his craft, the ability to use the past 200 years of orchestral composition in the way that a painter might use a palette, selecting the colours and textures appropriate to the mood of each movie?
 
“Yes, that’s the essence of being a film composer,” he says. “We are asked to conjure all sorts of moods. I remember in my early days being asked to write burlesque and vaudeville-type music for comedies simultaneously with supplying big romantic scores for dramas. If you are going to write music for cinema, or at least for more than one or two films, you have to accept all varieties of challenge. It goes with the territory.”
 
And although few people think of Williams as an avant-garde composer, there are many moments in his films when he displays a remarkable grasp of what were, at the time, very avant-garde techniques. The nebulous string clusters that open Close Encounters, for instance, could have come straight out of a score by Ligeti or Penderecki. “Yes, it’s true,” Williams acknowledges. “In film there’s often the need for a composer to change gear even in the space of a few minutes. So in Close Encounters, yes, you get those Penderecki-like clusters, but they are then combined with a romantic tune, all in the course of a six-minute sequence.”
 
Does his inspiration ever dry up? Down the phone there is a sardonic chuckle. “There can be no such thing as writer’s block in film composition,” he says. “You are closer to being a journalist than a novelist. You have a certain number of days to write a certain number of minutes of music, and you have to get on with it. It’s a job of carpentry, of manufacturing musical things.”
 
So he never hits a blank? “Oh sometimes, but if there’s a section of a scene I can’t think how to treat I will just move on to another bit, then come back to it. It usually solves itself.”
 
How much do film directors help or hinder the process? Another knowing chuckle down the line. “Directors will always talk about what they think they want musically,” Williams replies. “And I always listen to them. But usually when I get to the piano and start to work, those ideas are pretty much gone. It’s always better for me to respond to the visual material — the film that’s actually being shot — than to verbal instructions.
 
“And of course there’s huge variety in that species of humanity called film directors. Some are very musical. Others are suspicious of using music at all.”
 
Where does Steven Spielberg, the director with whom Williams has collaborated for 46 years, sit in that spectrum? “Oh, with Steven there can’t be enough music,” Williams exclaims. “He always wants more and more. It’s rather touching in its way. He will come to a recording session that ends at a certain hour, the musicians will be packing up, and Steven will say, ‘Where are they going? Why are you stopping? Haven’t you got anything else you can play?’ He just loves the process so much.”
 
Williams admits to being a “child of Hollywood” — his father, a jazz drummer, moved the family there in 1948, and Williams began his career playing piano in Hollywood orchestras throughout the 1950s. Yet some of his most famous scores for Spielberg were recorded not in Hollywood, but in Britain, with the London Symphony Orchestra at Denham or Shepperton studios.
 
“I was introduced to the LSO by my dear friend André Previn, when he was the orchestra’s principal conductor, and of course the LSO players were whizz kids at sight-reading, so we made many recordings together,” Williams recalls.
 
In fact, the story is more dramatic than that. In 1976 the LSO — in desperate financial difficulties — asked Previn if he could write another film score so the orchestra could make some money by recording it. Previn said he was too busy, but offered to phone a friend who was writing a score for “some sci-fi film”.
 
The friend was Williams, who said he would hire the LSO as long as the orchestra could squeeze in 18 sessions in the next month. The orchestra agreed, as long as some sessions could begin at 11pm, after its regular concerts were over. And thus was the soundtrack to Star Wars recorded.
 
Even more extraordinary, the LSO had just recruited a new principal trumpet — the soon-to-be-legendary Maurice Murphy. So on his first day in his new job Murphy’s first task was to blast the opening notes of one of the 20th century’s greatest movie melodies.
 
“Yes, Maurice came out to Denham and we started with the fanfare from Star Wars,” Williams recalls. “And of course he shocked the world by hitting that top C with that extrovert, heroic, raw timbre he had — the perfect sound for the kind of action film that Star Wars was. I loved him from that moment! We always said that we would have a round of golf together, but of course we never found the time, and then he died way too soon.”
 
With most work in Hollywood suspended during the pandemic, Williams might be forgiven for taking a well-earned break from composition. Not a bit of it. He’s spending his time finishing a violin concerto for Anne-Sophie Mutter, who also features in the Vienna concert playing virtuoso arrangements of his soundtracks (“Harry Potter meets Paganini,” Williams quips). Astonishingly, it will be the 19th concerto or quasi-concerto he has written for the concert hall.
 
“I think of my work outside film as being part of my own musical self-education,” he says. “And believe me, the road to being harp-savvy enough to write a harp concerto is a long one. But it’s also nice to write something that doesn’t require the approval of a studio boss. And, you know, even if I wasn’t being paid I would always want to write music. The greatest thrill of my life has been hearing my music played, almost immediately, by wonderful orchestras. It’s something I wish every composer could experience.”
 
He’s not so far away from his tenth decade. Does he ever contemplate hanging up his quill? “Never,” he says. “I will press on. Music isn’t a profession. It’s my oxygen. Take that away and I’d really be in trouble.”

They're great!

I love the drums if anyone cares. 

I'm so grateful that not only is he still scoring feature films this late in life and career, but that these late scores are all so good! 
 
It would be one thing if these new scores coming after 2005 (when he was freaking 73 already) were just OK-ish scores that are exciting for a little bit, then quickly forgotten... but for him to still be putting out so many bangers is astonishing and most welcome!  Some of these newer scores I love so much more than some of his scores from his peak years.
 
I will never blame him at all if he stops scoring features and just focuses on concert work, but I will be thrilled to no end if we find out he's scoring another feature!

CD and CD&Bluray have arrived! Unboxing starting shortly.
I'm in Germany: Lower Saxony south of Hannover.

That's great! Too bad you didn't ask about his favourite colour.
 
On a more serious note, I find your question to be a very good one, especially considering its implications: now JW will have to comment on his future plans regarding film scoring, and he may say something about his plans regarding new concert works as well.

No, Anne Sophie, it seems your PR people handled that incident rather well.

Oh no. I've become a massive fan of him, especially during the last year. Attended two concerts, began buying CDs. He was an amazing musician, who silenced the academia, which used to treat film music as a lesser art.

A reel for a sound film is closer to 11 minutes (standartized as 1000 ft of 35mm film, run at 24 frames per second)

A reel for a sound film is closer to 11 minutes (standartized as 1000 ft of 35mm film, run at 24 frames per second)

"This late work is a waste of imagination and a lesson in the dramatic use of serious instruments such as the bassoon and the bassoon".
 
What the actual?! This makes no sense, whatsoever.
 

I've just made this ~1 hour tribute video for Morricone, combining many different sources from the internet. I'm sure I'm testing the limits of Facebook guidelines in regards to copyrighted material, but nothing has been muted upon upload, so it might just pass as fair use:
https://www.facebook.com/pauliuseidukas/videos/4751260311566506/

This is garbage fake news and not worth sharing.

Here's my obituary (in Norwegian, use Google Translate if interested):
 
https://montages.no/nyheter/ennio-morricone-1928-2020/