'A John Williams Celebration' concert Blu-ray review

-



When the Walt Disney Company opened the doors to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra’s new home, in the fall of 2014, conductor Gustavo Dudamel dedicated the 2014/2015 season’s opening night concert to five-time Academy Award winning composer/conductor John Williams.

Williams, whose most recent work is the score to director J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens, is a legend in both the music and film industries. Since the late 1950s, he has composed and/or arranged music and served as music director for nearly eighty films, including “Saving Private Ryan,” “Amistad,” “Seven Years in Tibet,” “The Lost World,” “Rosewood,” “Schindler's List,” the Indiana Jones series, “Empire of the Sun,” “The Witches of Eastwick,” the Star Wars saga, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Superman,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Jaws” and “Catch Me if You Can.”

In C-Major Entertainment’s “A John Williams Celebration, director Michael Beyer and producer Bernhard Meyer capture the entire 85-minute concert performed by the L.A. Philharmonic under the baton of its 34-year-old musical director, Gustavo Dudamel.

A long-time fan of Williams’ movie scores and classical concert pieces (such as “Soundings” and “The Five Sacred Trees”), Dudamel worked behind the scenes with Williams on “The Force Awakens.” According to the Los Angeles Times, Dudamel conducted the opening and end titles music for the “Star Wars” saga’s newest film.

“A John Williams Celebration” is an eclectic sampler of Williams’ various compositions. Most of the pieces performed by the L.A. Philharmonic are culled from the composer’s large treasure trove of film scores. In addition, the program includes especially commissioned works, such as 1984’s “Olympic Fanfare and Theme’ and 2014’s “Soundings."
"For the 2014/15 Opening Night Concert and Gala, the Los Angeles Philharmonic paid loving tribute to composer John Williams, long a champion and close friend of the LA Phil. Gustavo Dudamel, an awestruck fan of the musical icon, led the orchestra in a cross section of Maestro Williams' matchless canon. Featuring Itzhak Perlman with a very special musical performance of pieces from Schindler's List as well as the Cadenza and variations from Fiddler on the Roof. Jazz elements will fill the air during Escapades from Catch Me if You Can, and may the force be with you during the iconic tunes from Star Wars.” – Back cover blurb, “A John Williams Celebration”

The concert program includes:

· “Olympic Fanfare and Theme”
· “Soundings”
· “Schindler’s List”
· “Fiddler on the Roof”
· “Catch Me if You Can”
· “Star Wars”
· “Amistad”
· “Jaws”
· “The Empire Strikes Back”

 The concert also features violinist Itzhak Perlman, who has collaborated with Williams on the score for “Schindler’s List” and two movie theme albums, “Cinema Serenade” and “Cinema Serenade 2: The Golden Age.”

The 2015 Blu-ray also has interviews with Williams, Perlman, and Dudamel. They’re not very long; the one with the two conductors is 13 minutes long, and Perlman’s has a running time of only three minutes.

Although many John Williams fans may miss hearing many of their favorite themes, “A John Williams Celebration” is still an enjoyable concert video. The video quality is not perfect, but the few flaws in the picture will bother only perfectionists who notice such things. The LPCM 2.0 stereo and 5.1 DTS-HD audio tracks, however, are pitch-perfect and clearly capture the nuances of the L.A. Philharmonic’s performance.

 Blu-ray Specifications:

 Video
  • Codec: MPEG-4 AVC
  • Resolution: 1080i
  • Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
  • Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Audio
  • English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
  • English: LPCM 2.0
Subtitles
  • French, Spanish, Japanese, German
Discs
  • 50GB Blu-ray Disc
  • Single disc (1 BD)
Packaging
  • Slipcover in original pressing
Playback
  • Region A
Miscellaneous
  • Rated: NR (Not Rated)
  • Studio: C Major Entertainment
  • Blu-ray/DVD Release Date: June 30, 2015
  • Run Time: 103 minutes

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more