Boston Pops Honor John Williams with Splendid Retrospective

John Williams was not present at last night's Boston Pops concert dedicated to his music, which led Keith Lockhart to joke that it gave him an opportunity to talk behind his back as to how great he is, and to conduct a splendid program that showed the breadth of his extraordinary career. As Lockhart pointed out, movie music is a relatively new genre, and Mr. Williams has been involved in it for seven decades. He made his debut composing music for the 1958 B-picture "Daddy-O."

There were no selections from "Daddy-O," but what Mr. Lockhart and the orchestra (of which Mr. Williams was the musical director) did was offer a curated sampling of his work accompanied by his knowing commentary. These video clips preceded the selections with a relaxed Mr. Williams explaining such things as how he put the menace in theme from "Jaws" (played with all menace intact) and his joy at coming back to "Star Wars" after 20 years and how it was like getting on an old bicycle again.

As he pointed out, "Star Wars" may be his magnum opus – a series of nine films for which he is the architect of the music; and it was well-represented with four selections, which ran from the earlier films ("The Imperial March" and the "Star Wars" main title) to the exquisite "Rey's Theme" from "The Force Awakens" (2015). Between them Williams explained on how he came to compose a theme for the character Yoda that emphasized this odd-looking character's inner beauty and heroism. (Williams says he didn't want to paint his exterior in musical terms.)

The concert featured much interplay between clips from some of the films - a section devoted to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" underscored how integral Williams' soaring music is to that visionary film; and clips from the Harry Potter films (shown to Williams' main theme from the first film) neatly encapsulated that epic franchise in a matter of minutes.

There were high points that involved soloists with the orchestra: Violinist Tamara Smirnova offered an exquisite reading of the theme from "Schindler's List," cellist Alexandre LeCarme captured the pathos of the Sayuri's theme from "Memories of the Geisha," and trumpeter Thomas Siders played the evocative main theme from "JFK" with stirring conviction.

There were some wonderful discoveries as well: The main theme from the 1968 television version of "Heidi" sounded like a love song from some long-lost operetta. The opening theme to "The Towering Inferno" has the extroverted spirit that would have been more at home in a big, Technicolor Western than this formulaic disaster pic. And the Devil's Dance from "The Witches of Eastwick" offered Williams at his most playful - a big nod to the kind of mad scherzos that remind one of Berlioz. Indeed, throughout the evening other composers (Bernard Herrmann, Leonard Bernstein) came to mind; but the beauty of John Williams is that he is a true original, and the loving attention that Lockhart and the orchestra brought to the pieces made that clear.

Keith Lockhart conducts the Boston Pops in a "John Williams Film Tribute" on Wednesday, May 29, and Thursday, May 30, at Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA. For more information, visit the Boston Pops website.