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'Star Wars' to 'Lincoln': A conductor picks his top five John Williams pieces

 
Bob Bernhardt is the guest conductor for an all-John Williams concert with the Florida Orchestra this weekend.
Bob Bernhardt is the guest conductor for an all-John Williams concert with the Florida Orchestra this weekend.
Published March 3, 2015

Ask a diehard John Williams fan to pick his top five pieces, and he'll probably say it's just not possible. • Such is the case for Bob Bernhardt, who visits the Florida Orchestra this weekend to conduct an all-John Williams concert spanning everything from Superman to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to E.T. And, of course, Star Wars. • "This is tough," said Bernhardt, principal pops conductor of the Chattanooga Symphony and Opera, the Louisville Orchestra and the Grand Rapids Symphony. "Because for one, he's my hero." • Williams, 83, is the prolific American composer behind some of the best-known music in our modern culture. While some Williams work is omnipresent, some may surprise you. • "He's been writing basically for half the century, and other than Richard Strauss and Giuseppe Verdi, you're hard-put to find any great composer still writing music of incredible value in their 80s." • Still, Bernhardt was willing to confront our challenge in some way. He agreed to narrow down his five favorite sections from the concerts he's conducting in Tampa Bay this weekend, explained below in his words. He couldn't rank them, though. • That would just be crazy.

With Malice Toward None from Lincoln

"In a concert of John Williams, a conductor has to be extremely attuned to pacing and endurance. As we all know, John Williams writes some of the most potent and visceral music there is, and everyone plays a lot of notes, but there's a particular burden on the brass. With Malice Toward None, the version that we're doing, it is for strings alone. It's a profound 3 ½ minutes. It happens at the very end of the movie. There is a flashback to his second inaugural address in which he tries to sum up in a very few words what lies before the country. 'With malice toward none' is one of the great lines from that second inaugural, where it's time to heal the wounds of civil war, and it is in its simplicity and beauty that it's a masterpiece."

Anakin's Theme from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, followed by The Imperial March from Star Wars

"Just imagine you've written one of the highest-grossing, most important and most famous film scores in history, and then a number of years go by and someone like George Lucas comes up to you and says, 'Remember four, five and six? I'm going to do one, two and three.' Now John Williams is faced with an incredible and very welcome challenge. He has to precompose himself, meaning, we all know these themes, but The Imperial March does not apply to a 15-year-old Anakin Skywalker. Anakin's Theme has in it . . . the literary term is foreshadowing. It gives hints of the Vader to come. At the very end of Anakin's Theme, we hear the 'ba-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun,' which is The Imperial March. Placing them back to back, you can see just a little insight into the problem that he had, and the brilliant way he handled it. You've got a young kid that's extremely troubled. You don't know if he's going to become Abe Lincoln or Mussolini."

The Mission from NBC Nightly News

"This is off-the-beaten-track John Williams. I love The Mission, which is actually a little more topical now than I would want it to be, because of the Brian Williams situation. This is the music John Williams wrote for NBC in the '80s, and it's the main theme song for NBC Nightly News. No one has ever heard more than 15 or 30 seconds of it."

Flight to Neverland from Hook

"I put in a piece that I absolutely adore, and it doesn't get a lot of attention because the movie kind of came and went. It starred the late Robin Williams. We're starting the second half with a piece called Flight to Neverland, and I think it's one of those swashbuckling pieces, and absolutely fabulous."

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Viktor's Tale from THE TERMINAL, and the main theme from Schindler's List

"The two solos we're doing, they highlight members of the orchestra and put them front and center. In this case, it's the solos for clarinet and for the concertmaster. Viktor's Tale is from The Terminal, which is the Tom Hanks movie. It kind of pinpoints his ethnicity to somewhere in central Europe, and it's playful and fun. The other part is the main theme from Schindler's List. It was Williams' fifth and, so far, last Oscar. It has made it to the concert stage. It's performed by a lot of great violinists as an encore to a concerto of Tchaikovsky. It's beautiful in the same manner of the Lincoln. In association with the movie, it's exhilarating."

Contact Stephanie Hayes at shayes@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8716. Follow @stephhayes.