You know the movies... and you love his music! Star Wars, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, E.T., and more!

Ticket Scale	Boxes	Front Orch	Rear Orch	Loge	Lawn
B	$48	$48	$38	$32	$20

Flying Music
A note on the evening's performance by
NSO@Wolf Trap's Festival Conductor Emil de Cou.

Much has been written about tonight’s featured composer, John Williams. He has been honored, awarded, lauded, and most importantly, loved by millions of moviegoers around the world. He’s even trumped Beethoven and the most famous four notes in musical history, the Fifth Symphony’s “da-da-da-DA,” with two—that menacing, gurgling two-note theme from Jaws. His score for the epic Star Wars series runs nearly as long as Wager’s Ring cycle, which I find is much more entertaining. Though he is fantastically famous and without peer, John is one of the most humble, approachable, and genuinely warm people I have ever met. Tough seasoned musicians turn into star-struck kids whenever he enters the room.

Several years ago John conducted a concert of his film music with the NSO. During that week a stack of music on his dressing room piano became taller and taller—not with scores he was performing, but with pieces that the musicians brought in to be autographed. Toward the end of that week, we were rehearsing ET to be performed in sync with Elliot’s climatic escape with his alien friend, his bicycle floating into the night sky above the San Fernando Valley.

After rehearsal, I stayed and watched John and some technicians running the video without music in the darkened concert hall, and I was struck at how ordinary the end of the movie felt when played in silence. The bicycle squeaked, the boys sped over hills, the police chased, and the spaceship took off—but it was a completely different experience. Like Bernard Herrmann’s shower scene in Psycho, or the opening fanfare of 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is the music (John’s music) that causes goose bumps as Elliot’s bicycle lifts into the air and brings a tear to your eye when he and ET have a final embrace. With this and countless other films, John helped revive a golden age of Hollywood, a time when Korngold, Waxman, and Steiner were writing their greatest scores.

In the disco age of the 1970s, this lush orchestral film music was considered hopelessly old-fashioned—but when Johnny Williams (as he was called then) and Steven Spielberg began their partnership, the sound of full symphonic orchestra reemerged as an indispensable part of the film experience. Growing up in Los Angeles, I have always had a passion for movies. Nothing makes me happier than sitting in a darkened theater just as the film is about to begin, poised to embark on an adventure to unimaginable places—or maybe just to the hills above the San Fernando Valley.

I have never lost the thrill of performing the final moments of ET. Maybe it’s because I (like us all) become one of Elliott’s friends as we fly across the smoggy skies of my youth. Maybe it’s because it is one of the best-crafted works of modern theatrical music. Maybe it’s because I will never forget being in the Kennedy Center listening and watching the end of that now iconic film with an audience of well-dressed Washingtonians and hundreds of barely suppressed sniffles. Or maybe it’s because I too, like my NSO friends, treasure my John Williams autograph on the title page of my favorite score.
—Emil de Cou