Music Album Review: 'John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999'

Slipcover for John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999. Designed by Roxanne Slimak. (C) 1999 Sony Classical/Sony Masterworks

Official Sony Classical Video: The Reivers: Main Theme

On November 2, 1999, Sony Classical released John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999, a two-disc collection of movie themes and event-related orchestral works composed and conducted by the five-time Academy Award-winning composer and Laureate Conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Culled from various recordings with different ensembles – including the aforementioned BPO and the Tanglewood, Boston, London, and even Skywalker Symphony Orchestras, this popular recording celebrates the first 30 years of Maestro Williams’ stellar – and ongoing – career as the go-to master of film scores and commissioned “special events” orchestral pieces.

Produced by Laraine Perri and designed by Sony artist Roxanne Slimak, John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999 distributes 28 themes and “special events” compositions by Maestro Williams evenly between two CDs. Altogether, the compilation album contains two hours and 24 minutes’ worth of music from Star Wars, The Reivers, the 1984 and 1996 Summer Olympic Games, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman, Saving Private Ryan, Home Alone, and many more. 

Official Sony Classical Video: Superman - March

Although John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999 does not present Maestro Williams in chronological order as listeners may expect from listening to similar compilation albums by other artists (Billy Joel: Greatest Hits Collection – 1973-1997 comes to mind), it does divide the various tracks roughly into two periods. 

Every fan of STAR WARS – and of great music – is in his debt. – George Lucas

Official Sony Classical Video: The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)

Disc One, which has a gold-colored label, covers what I like to call Maestro Williams’ “blockbuster” era and spans an 18-year period that starts in 1969 and ends in 1987. Here, John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999 treats us to familiar – and maybe not so familiar – musical pieces that those of us who were children/adolescents in the 1970s and early ‘80s grew up with.

Official Sony Classical Video: Theme from The Sugarland Express

With a total playing time of one hour, six minutes, and 11 seconds, Disc One’s 14 tracks are:

1. "Star Wars - Main Title" – 5:44
2. "E.T. - Flying Theme" – 3:42
3. "Superman - Main Title" – 4:25
4. "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - Parade of the Slave Children" – 4:53
5. "Sugarland Express - Theme" – 3:35
6. "Jaws - Theme" – 2:31
7. "Olympic Fanfare and Theme" – 4:28
8. "Return of the Jedi - Luke and Leia" – 5:02
9. "The Reivers - Main Title" – 5:13
10. "The Empire Strikes Back - The Imperial March" – 3:04
11. "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra" – 2:48
12. "Empire of the Sun - Cadillac of the Skies" – 4:58
13. "Raiders of the Lost Ark - The Raider's March (End Credits)" – 5:11
14. "Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Suite" – 9:46

• Total Disc Time: 66:11

Disc Two has a black label and features music from John Williams’ “middle passage” that corresponds to his retirement as principal conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra in 1993 and his work on more serious, adult movies, including those of his long-time collaborator, Steven Spielberg. That’s not to say that there are no themes from crowd-pleasing “summer movies: like Star Wars – Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Home Alone, or Jurassic Park; those films are represented here in three of Disc Two’s tracks. For the most part, album producer Laraine Perri selected concert arrangements of music from films with somber subject matter (Saving Private Ryan, JFK, Rosewood, and Stepmom)

Again, the tracks are not arranged in chronological order, although – with the exception of the march from Spielberg’s 1979 World War II comedy 1941 – the music is from the eight-year span between 1991’s Hook and 1999’s The Phantom Menace.

Disc Two’s 14 tracks are:

1. 
   "Saving Private Ryan - Hymn to the Fallen" – 6:10
2. "Jurassic Park - Theme" – 5:29
3. "Schindler's List - Theme" – 3:32
4. "Hook - Flight to Neverland" – 4:41
5. "Seven Years in Tibet - Seven Years in Tibet" – 7:09
6. "JFK - Prologue" – 4:00
7. "Stepmom - The Days Between" – 6:27
8. "1941 - March" – 4:14
9. "Home Alone - Somewhere in My Memory – 4:54
10. "Summon the Heroes" – 6:14
11. "Rosewood - Look Down, Lord" – 4:12
12. "Far and Away - Theme" – 5:34
13. "Born on the Fourth of July - Theme" – 6:20
14. "Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace - Duel of the Fates" – 4:14

• Total Disc Time: 73:41

Artwork for the album cover/liner notes booklet by Roxanne Slimak. (C) 1999 Sony Classical/Sony Masterworks

My Take

I want to salute John Williams – the quintessential film composer. John has transformed and uplifted every movie that we’ve made together. – Steven Spielberg (from the album THE SPIELBERG/WILLIAMS COLLABORATION)

Official Sony Classical Video: Main Title from Star Wars

I’ve been a star-struck fan of Maestro John Williams ever since that afternoon in 1977 when I sat in a dark Miami-area theater with 200 fans to watch Star Wars. For me, it was my first viewing of George Lucas’s now-classic space-fantasy set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” For many in that now-closed theater in the old Concord Mall, it was probably their tenth, maybe even twentieth visit to that then-new fictional universe inhabited by quirky robots, fascist Imperials, a captive Princess, stalwart Rebels, and a farm boy-turned-hero Luke Skywalker.

At the time, I was skeptical about the movie that apparently everyone on Earth had seen except for me. I wasn’t much of a sci-fi geek then, and when I saw the TV ads for Star Wars I dismissed it as a movie for kids. (Which, of course, it is. But it just happens to appeal to the kid in all of us, not just actual kids.) 

Official Sony Classical Video: Cadillac of the Skies from Empire of the Sun

But from the opening theme that underscores Star Wars’ main title and the 1930s-style crawl to the glorious “hope and glory” composition for the throne room and end title sequences, Williams’ symphonic score – a rarity in the 1970s – captured my adolescent imagination and has never let go.

Later, when I learned more about Williams’ career as a composer for television and feature films, I realized that I had already been exposed to his magical way with clefs and musical notes. With incidental music from silly situation comedies like Gilligan’s Island to scores for 1970s disaster epics such as The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake, Williams had already been a musical presence in my life. I just had not been consciously aware of it!

The 28 tracks of John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999 are, in great part, selections that form the soundtrack of my life. In fact, I’ve seen almost all of the films and special occasions that are represented in this wonderful two-disc compilation, including the opening ceremonies to the 1984 (Los Angeles) and the 1996 (Atlanta) Summer Olympics. (The exceptions are The Reivers, Seven Years in Tibet, Rosewood, and Stepmom.)

For me, it’s hard to be objective when it comes to Maestro Williams’ music. I love every concert arrangement presented in John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999, even though I can’t honestly say the same for at least two of the movies they are from. (I fell asleep watching Hook at the movies in 1991 and have no interest in buying a home media release, and I loathe Oliver Stone’s JFK.  But I still love Flight to Neverland from the former and Prologue from the latter. Go figure.)  

I’ve owned this album practically since it was released in 1999. I found it by chance when I was shopping at one of the two record stores – now closed, sadly – at the Miami International Mall. It had, naturally, a lot of material from albums I already owned, such as Sony Classical’ s John Williams Conducts John Williams: The Star Wars Trilogy (a 1990 recording that Maestro Williams made with the Skywalker Symphony Orchestra, a San Francisco-area ensemble hired by George Lucas exclusively for that occasion), various soundtrack albums, and, of course, many Boston Pops Orchestra records of the time.

Still, as in every compilation album of this genre, there was always something new to discover. For me, the new stuff came from movies I had not seen (The Reivers, Rosewood) or new takes on themes I already knew by heart.

For instance, I had already heard Williams’ Olympic Fanfare (Disc One, Track 7) countless times on By Request: The Best of John Williams and the Boston Pops. When I saw it on the album program list, I thought, Oh, I’ve heard this before!

Imagine my surprise, then, when Track 7 on Disc One began – with French-American composer Leo Arnaud’s Bugler’s Dream, a fanfare originally written in 1958 and used extensively for ABC-TV’s coverage of the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria and subsequent Olympiads. (I first heard Bugler’s Dream in 1972 while watching the Summer Games in Miami.) It segued nicely into the more familiar fanfare from 1984. Nice trick, that one.

It goes without saying that John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999 is one of my favorite compilation albums. Its music covers a wide spectrum of genres and emotional contexts – from the stirring marches of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman, and even the quirky 1941 to the funereal “Taps”-like trumpet call of Prologue from JFK, Maestro Williams shows listeners his almost magical ability to conjure themes and melodies that fit perfectly with the visual works of directors as different in personalities and cinematic sensibilities as George Lucas, Mark Rydell, Oliver Stone, Richard Donner, Chris Columbus, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Ron Howard, and John Singleton.

Truly, John Williams: Greatest Hits 1969-1999 is a treasure trove of musical memories that every fan of film music – or simply great music – should own.