Concert Review: CELEBRATING JOHN WILLIAMS (LA Phil)

Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic’s Celebrating John Williams concerto on April 5, 2025, as not so much a concert as it was a cultural séance in which John Williams’ scores, so deeply embedded in the American psyche, were summoned and reanimated with startling freshness. The program, filled entirely with Williams’ most iconic works, could have easily turned into an exercise in mass nostalgia.

Nostalgia, however, is a blunt instrument. What Dudamel tapped into was something subtler and stranger—cultural memory, which isn’t just about recollection, but about recognition. These themes aren’t tied to specific plot points anymore. They live in the muscle memory of the audience, folded into how Americans experience awe, courage, and loss. Williams has composed not just for characters, but for archetypes: the explorer, the alien, the orphaned hero. So when these melodies resurface, they don’t bring back movies. They bring back moods. They recall how it felt to be ten years old and invincible, or twenty-five and hopeful, or sixty and suddenly aware of mortality. The concert worked not because it reminded us of cinema, but because it reminded us of ourselves—or perhaps of the selves we once believed we were.

In a concert landscape where film scores still struggle for classical legitimacy, Williams’ enduring partnership with the LA Phil feels almost subversive. That boundary, between concert hall and cinema screen, has long been guarded by the custodians of “serious” music, who fear that narrative and accessibility dilute artistic rigor. This concert didn’t just blur that line. It redrew it. Yet in doing so, it also left open a question: does opening the gates to cinematic music expand classical artistry or subtly narrow it to what feels immediately familiar? There was no token concert piece to justify the spectacle. Instead, it suggested that thematic clarity, emotional coherence, and melodic immediacy are virtues, even in symphonic form. Williams’ scores expose the artificiality of the divide, but they also hint at a new orthodoxy: music that dares less to disorient than to reaffirm.

This concert marked another milestone in Williams’ decades-long association with the LA Phil, dating back to his first guest conducting appearance in 1978. Since then, he has become an unofficial composer-in-residence, premiering several concert works with the orchestra, including his Violin Concerto No. 2 in 2021. Williams and Dudamel’s artistic partnership, which began when the Venezuelan conductor took the LA Phil’s helm in 2009, has evolved into one of classical music’s most fruitful contemporary collaborations—a meeting of cinematic Americana and Latin interpretive fire that revitalizes both traditions.

The concert opened with the Olympic Fanfare and Theme, which has become something like a national anthem. In Dudamel’s hands, it shone without glitz, with the brass proclaiming rather than just playing. The rhythm had the authority of a procession, but one infused with optimism rather than triumphalism. From there, Close Encounters of the Third Kind arrived like a visitation. The famous five-note motif—more cultural glyph than melody at this point—floated in on a mist of eerie harmonies and textures, moving slowly, then with ever-increasing gravity. Dudamel let it build with a patient sense of awe, until it tipped into a cosmic crescendo that, in a different orchestration, could have passed for Bruckner.

The Harry Potter selections that followed offered something else entirely: charm, delicacy, and a streak of melancholy that often gets lost behind the franchise’s visual effects. There was a vulnerability to the phrasing, especially in the woodwinds, which caught you off guard. It’s easy to forget that much of Williams’ magic rests not in bombast but in restraint. That same restraint was put to subtle use in Dear Basketball, one of his more recent pieces, written for Kobe Bryant’s short film. There is no irony and no subtext here. Just a tender, heartfelt line for cello, played with quiet grace by principal cellist Robert deMaine, over a silky orchestral backdrop. It could have veered into sentimentality but somehow did not. Instead, it was played as an honest farewell. The program’s emotional range expanded here, pivoting from mythic scale to personal grief—an arc that subtly structured the evening.

After the break, the program entered more challenging terrain—Superman, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Jaws, and Star Wars. This is the danger zone, where great music becomes a meme of itself. But Dudamel refused to let the set pieces become stale. Jurassic Park arrived not as the soaring dino-hymn we’ve come to expect but as something gentler—almost pastoral. The strings brushed against the theme with a kind of reverence, not exultation, and it worked. Indiana Jones brought back the swagger, but even here, Dudamel found space for shape and inflection. Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra came off with a surprising touch of swing, more Leonard Bernstein than action score. And then there was Jaws, that infamous two-note motif, so absurdly over-referenced it’s almost hard to hear anymore. But in a live hall, with the low strings digging in and the winds whispering above, it reclaimed its menace. The fugue—yes, fugue—was taut, biting, and slightly insane. That moment, brief but electrifying, offered a glimpse of the contrapuntal finesse Williams wields with far greater freedom in his concert music.

Still, one couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened if Dudamel, for all his brilliance, had pushed these familiar themes further toward discomfort. He kept the spirit reverent—maybe wisely—but left the deeper challenge of reimagining Williams’ cultural footprint for another night.

The final word belonged, predictably, to Star Wars. Princess Leia’s Theme ached. The violins sang it without pushing, letting the melody hover. Then came the Throne Room and Finale, a symphonic big bang. Everything—timpani, horns, harp glissandi, string flourishes—collided into that familiar majesty. It should have felt over the top. Somehow it didn’t.

The audience leapt to its feet in a thunderous ovation with genuine fervor. It was a collective recognition of the alchemy between Williams’ compositions, Dudamel’s interpretive vision, and the hometown orchestra’s luminous execution.

This was not an evening about cinematic memory, though it touched that nerve over and over. It was about orchestral writing that endures because it knows how to speak plainly to a large audience. Williams may also be the last composer Americans agree on. In a cultural climate fractured by taste, politics, and social media algorithms, Williams remains oddly above the fray—an artist whose work transcends tribes. Yet even that consensus invites reflection. When an artist is beloved by critics and casual listeners alike, when orchestras program his works without the need for intellectual apology, the question arises: are we witnessing triumph, or the subtle calcification of nostalgia? Williams’ music is not above criticism. It is beyond irony—for now. With Williams, we glimpse something incredibly rare in American culture: consensus without compromise. And yet, consensus, too, can become its own kind of limit.

That makes his achievement no less miraculous, only more fragile.