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I'll be there! I had some pandemic credit built up from the original cancelled Jurassic Park concert, so I finally ponied up for the entire CSO at the Movies series, which then enabled me to buy tickets for the Williams show (while seeing JP and Return of the Jedi to boot). I've never spent so much on tickets for anything at one pop before, but every accessible Williams show becomes more valuable with each passing year.

I think we can all agree it's great to have another Williams cue called "The _______ Scene" in the canon.

Someone really needs to composite a brachiosaurus into those long shots.

I finally ponied up for the DCH recording this week. So great! And something about the recording (or mixing or mic placement or my headphones) seemed to bring out elements of even very familiar pieces that I had never paid attention to before. (Turns out there are some very cool low string lines in E.T.!) This Blu-Ray news couldn't have dropped at a better time for me. In what sense is the DCH version edited? Are there pieces excised, or just transitions between applause and talking?

Top 10 possibilities for the second Blu-Ray... Fully orchestrated performance of the original draft of Rey's Theme World premiere of the First Order March, written for TLJ and rejected by Rian Johnson A medley of all themes from The Eiger Sanction expertly hummed by Anne-Sophie Mutter Outtake of JW conducting Jurassic Park in an inflatable T. rex suit Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith Ultimate Editions (Blu-Ray Audio only, no clean endings) Premiere performance of the Love Theme from The Terminal for Orchestra (I will never stop talking about this) Complete performance of the full BPO concert program by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, for broadcast in Russia in case the Iron Curtain goes back up The Secret Ways with isolated score The Olympic Dream of the Spirit of the Champion Heroes, composed for LA 2028 Orchestral premiere of "Battleforce" from the TLJ Verizon ad, ending with Williams pulling off a Mission: Impossible mask to reveal himself as William Ross, before being run through with a baton by Gordy Haab, who then picks up the baton and conducts "Han's Kessel Run" from Battlefront 2

Totally agree about the unfortunate timeline of these two musical nostalgia bursts. I actually find the reuse in ROTJ lazier from a musical standpoint, particularly since it shows up in both Sail Barge Assault and Superstructure Chase (right?). Honestly, what marred the appearance in TLJ for me was more that it was the third major needle-drop of that score, after the concert suite appearances for Leia and Yoda (with all those scenes' attendant baggage in the lore). By the time the salt cave chase arrived, TLJ had so thoroughly lost me that the recycled music hit differently than it would have in a film I was enjoying. Regardless of my reaction to TLJ's plot, though, I also found the staging of that sequence so similar to the Star Destroyer wreckage chase from the immediately prior film (Millennium Falcon dueling a small number of TIE fighters in a long, narrow tunnel) that it struck me as a boring choice in the middle of an already derivative speeders-and-walkers battle. This is off-topic, but it leads me to articulate a particular bugaboo of mine about TLJ that I don't think I'd thought of before: for a film that was so determined to torch the Star Wars playbook (and received nonstop fawning in the entertainment press for doing just that), nearly every major sequence in it has an immediate analogue in either ESB or ROTJ: base escape, reluctant mentor meeting, protracted space pursuit, opulent resort interlude, abortive departure from would-be mentor, self-turn-in to woo villain to the light, throne room torture/betrayal scene, infiltration of enemy capital ship (that's from ANH), "snow" battle with speeders and walkers. The two lightsaber duels are the film's most iconic scenes because they're two of its only totally original ideas.

My only exposure to this score was one of the poppier arrangements of the main theme, so I pretty much subconsciously wrote off the rest of the score for years. Not available, not intriguing, not a problem for me. But thanks to the new release—and, even more so, thanks to@TownerFan's excellent podcast with Mattessino commemorating it—I was exposed to cues like "Top of the World" and the training material, and this became an instant buy. One of the joys of the mature phase of my Williams fandom has been discovering that there's something worth having even on the Williams scores you think you don't care about (even that one cue on Images that I can't bring myself to buy the whole album for... )

It can't be the same suite, because that recording features Perlman on solo violin. (Speaking of which, I wonder if that's the only Williams piece to have been rearranged by the Maestro two separate times for the same solo instrument? Maybe Geisha would be the other.) Unrelated: if this does get released, will it be the fastest Jurassic Park Williams has ever recorded?

Sorry if this has already come up, but was the Far and Away suite new or rare in some way? I'm familiar with the Perlman recording from Cinema Serenade and the new Mutter arrangement, but I don't know of a place where this suite has been recorded (even though it's likely, now that I think about it, that I heard it live in Chicago in 2007 under the title "County Galway, 19XX").

Welcome (back to my) home, Maestro! Does Corporate Night mean it's only for bigwigs, or just that it's priced for bigwigs?

I'd be surprised if the tweaked "Across the Stars" made it to the album, since she already recorded it in the studio. Wasn't that itself an update of an earlier violin arrangement she performed somewhere in Europe the year before the album came out? Upshot: there's plenty of room on the album for "Crimebuster for Violin and Orchestra." Unrelated: this would never happen, but wouldn't it be cool for Williams to do a Halloween album with Mutter? Tracks 1-3 are done already! Devil's Dance Hedwig's Theme Night Journeys The Chamber of Secrets Duel of the Fates Anthem of Evil Highwood's Ghost Family Plot The Fury In Search of Unicorns

Well, you should be!

CONFIRMED: Williams is Ra's al-Ghul, and he has emerged once again from his Lazarus Pit.

And it's both fascinating and hilarious as usual. I don't usually find myself grinning ear to ear while driving alone, but it's guaranteed whenever these guys drop a new episode. I was glad to hear some well-earned praise for Giacchino's Marvel fanfare and some well-earned apathy for that anonymous hackwork that plays over the Disney+ Star Wars logo. Let's hope, as they suggest, that someone at Disney comes to their senses and commissions a proper fanfare in the coming years. Meanwhile, I have Johnny's next late-career reimagining project: Fantasy for Orchestra on the Amblin Logo!

Not a YouTube clip, but my occasional "John Williams year:2021" Spotify search yielded this today. They also do "The Shire" and the Sleeping Beauty Waltz.

As long as we're all nitpicking, fixed!

Wow. I was just re-listening to the violin arrangement of Rey's Theme about a week ago thinking, "If all Williams did for the rest of his career was reinvigorate his concert suites for violin and orchestra, it would be more than enough." Instead, we get even more of that AND the promise of new film work. What a gift.

Also, dang it! When I opened the thread I thought we were finally getting the Ma/Williams album we deserve, chock full of film music suites for cello. Ma did this with Morricone decades ago, but Williams' film music remains tragically under-recorded on my favorite instrument. Also, Ma already recorded the concerto! Revised or not, don't let Yo-Yo's penchant for yo-yoing back to previously tackled pieces distract you, Maestro! We need "Love Theme from The Terminal for Cello and Orchestra"! Maybe we'll get a couple of bonus arrangements on the back half?

Urge him not to. Rian Johnson's fanboy love for Williams was endearing, but I think it inadvertently led to a less creatively fertile score than we might have gotten without the Williams temp track.

Update: now that Disney has an upcharged replacement for FastPass, I guess they don't care as much about total immersion in Galaxy's Edge as they did before. Now the attraction doesn't have a proper sign, but the Lightning Lane™ for it does. So can we get some Williams music in there now?

Do all these successfully delivered replacement discs mean it'll be back in stock at Intrada soon?

Amen! Just about everything I know about Mass parts in Latin I originally learned from this soundtrack, squinting to make out tiny black italic text on that absurdly reddish-brown cassette insert!

The Film Symphony Orchestra just debuted their performance of AoH, and it rocks! Give it a look and fall in love with this piece all over again! These guys should do a Blu-Ray…

I’ve visited in person, and Tom is dead-on. The lack of orchestral music in the Star Wars idiom is a glaring flaw in the land’s otherwise excellent design, one that has been commented on by several theme park blogs in reviewing the land as a whole. It’s eerily quiet in most of the land in a way that glaringly fails to remind you of scenes from the films, which nearly always have a Western orchestra playing neo-Romantic music under them. It’s inexplicable that Disney would voluntarily forget the playbook they’ve been using for 65 years to create immersive environments and arbitrarily tie one hand behind their backs in terms of sensory immersion in the theme. Literally every other land they’ve ever created uses music as part of the immersion. This one arrogantly attempts to reinvent the wheel and kneecaps itself in the process. I am not calm either. 😎

The German version of "Top of the World" ("Uber der Weldt"? Something like that...) also blows the updated one out of the water. Cutting back on the silliness of the gargoyles in the new show meant this song had to change, but the "A Guy Like You"-esque counterpoint vocals in the original are fantastic (better than "A Guy Like You," in fact). And unlike most of these spectacular 1999 songs, you can actually hear this one in English, thanks to this fantastic YouTube cover from a few years back. There's a sort of "B theme" to Esmerelda's part of the song ("When my outlook is a glum one...") that just oozes peak Menken, and it's totally gone in the 2017 version. Plus the back and forth between the gargoyles and Quasimodo in the finale of the song is heartwarming and ingenious. The same account also did "Out of Love (Reprise)," which is also excellent, and sadly they stopped there. An English version of "Balancing Act" is still on my "Things to Finance When I'm a Billionaire" list. Incidentally, while we're pooping on the 2017 downgrades to the musical—truly a carousel of unforced errors—you should also check out the original version of "Esmerelda," the Act I closer, which was equally maimed in the updated show. The original can be seen in English on YouTube in a weird, iffily acted but incredibly well-funded and absurdly talented Florida high school production that remains, I think, the only publicly staged English performance of the 1999 show. Unlike the bloated, aimlessly operatic 2017 version, nearly every melody that's sung in this brilliant pseudo-"One Day More" is drawn from somewhere else in the score, and it ties together Quasi, Phoebus, Frollo, and Esmerelda in an absolutely mesmerizing piece of musical theatre that mostly comes through even when performed by teenage amateurs. (One key line of Phoebus's from the German version is randomly transferred to Frollo here...see if you can guess which it is!) Naturally, that production's performance of "Balancing Act," if it ever existed, is not preserved on the YouTube playlist. *sigh* As you can see, Comparative Hunchback Studies is my long-lost college major. But it's a heck of a field!