Boston Pops Celebrates 30th Anniversary of Conductor Laureate John Williams with "Hooray for Hollywood"

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John Williams Leads the Pops in Some of His Most Memorable Film Music, May 15th

Celebrating the Boston Pops 125th anniversary season, Conductor Laureate John Williams returns to the Pops podium to lead the orchestra a week of concerts, May 11-15. This special program, entitled “Hooray for Hollywood,” showcases some of Mr. Williams’s most memorable movie music, including Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Harry Potter series, with the Boston Pops performing these iconic scores in sync with classic clips from the equally iconic movies. In honor of the occasion, the program includes Mr. Williams’s moving Hymn to New England, which features the world premiere of a new film by Susan Dangel and Dick Bartlett, a retrospective of many of the great moments in Boston Pops history under Mr. Williams’s baton. The Pops will also perform Williams’s Liberty Fanfare and some of his other classic film music from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Star Wars. In addition, Boston Pops concertmistress Tamara Smirnova is featured as the violin soloist in the “Love Theme” from the charming Italian cinematic ode to the power of movie magic, Cinema Paradiso.

When John Williams (Boston Pops Conductor 1980-1993) succeeded Arthur Fiedler in 1980 as Conductor of the Boston Pops, he was already the most highly acclaimed composer in Hollywood. Today, with 45 Academy Award nominations to his credit, he is the most-nominated living person in Academy history. With the Pops, Mr. Williams continued the orchestra’s prolific recording tradition and entertained audiences with live orchestral accompaniment to some of the great film clips of the 20th and 21st centuries. He brought in the great arrangers of the day to produce new and exclusive Boston Pops arrangements of American songbook classics and legendary hits of the jazz, swing, and big band eras. And he brought a bit of Hollywood stardust to the Pops stage, with special appearances by Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Frank Langella, not to mention Darth Vader, R2D2, and C3PO.

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