John Williams reviews

Nadine Sierra, Susan Graham, Thomas Hampson, Midori, Yo-Yo Ma, Kian Soltani et al; Boston Symphony Orchestra/Andris Nelsons, Michael Tilson Thomas et al (C Major, DVD)

Janine Jansen, the latest hot young fiddler on the block (25 years old) and already a major star in her native Holland, is one of BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Artists. At the time of writing she is due to make her first appearance at the Proms.

The Five Sacred Trees, a tone poem in the form of a bassoon concerto, is ravishing. John Williams’s almost innocent, unabashedly neo-Romantic new piece evokes the oak and other sacred trees of Celtic folklore. After the bassoon’s opening, sombre solo, Eo Mugna explodes in a filigree of woodwinds and strings that wrap themselves higher and higher around a sturdy tonal trunk. Tortan is a jig of sorts, the fiddle challenging the bassoon in joyful syncopation. LeClair’s articulation here is breathtaking.

Mood, mode and temper are the bonding links in an original programme. In his contemporary choices Williams has always given the impression of searching. With this selection he comes near to articulating one part of a personal aesthetic. Strongly melodic, the music favours modality rather than tonality and enters a world in which old music from the Christian and Muslim Mediterranean shares features with traditional and Renaissance strains from northern Europe and with compositions that adopt these idioms.

Here is the essential space odyssey – well, potentially anyway. Mehta and his virtuoso West Coast band impress most in Holst’s seven planets but its once famous view of Zarathustra endures less well, its glossy over-emphasis and spongy timpani inclining to lose speed. In the John Williams suites, the first Star Wars music, contrary to the composer’s own performance (with the LSO), is radically curtailed, with the Cantina Band number awkwardly contrived. Ates Orga

Is JEAN-LUC GODARD God? Well, his supporters would have us believe that he is at least Proust, Joyce and a millennial prophet all rolled into one. Those who haven’t seen his four-part video essay Histoire(s) du cinema ‘won’t have understood our times, they’ll have missed the end of the century’, opines one starry-eyed zealot. Having missed the end of the century, what can we poor saps do? Easy: invest in the soundtrack from ECM.

Is JEAN-LUC GODARD God? Well, his supporters would have us believe that he is at least Proust, Joyce and a millennial prophet all rolled into one. Those who haven’t seen his four-part video essay Histoire(s) du cinema ‘won’t have understood our times, they’ll have missed the end of the century’, opines one starry-eyed zealot. Having missed the end of the century, what can we poor saps do? Easy: invest in the soundtrack from ECM.

Just as some people found it almost impossible to take Orson Welles seriously after the Carlsberg ads, the music for Star Wars casts a long shadow over the career of John Williams. On this CD are two of Williams’s concert works, together with a reminder of his cinema activity in the shape of some tear-jerking schmaltz he wrote for the film Schindler’s List, cut to the saccharine requirements of its director Steven Spielberg.