Featuring Artist, Maya Anjali Buchanan
KORNGOLD| Violin Concerto
HORNER | Titanic Suite
SCHIFRIN | Mission: Impossible
HURWITZ | La La Land Suite
No playlist dedicated to Route 66 would be complete without a visit to Hollywood! Our soundtrack features music from Titanic, Far and Away, Mission: Impossible, Casablanca, and much more. Plus, rising superstar violinist Maya Anjali Buchanan will join Signature Symphony for Erich Korngold’s cinematic Violin Concerto!
About the Featured Artist
Recognized for her enchanting performances and exceptional lyricism, Indian-American violinist Maya Anjali Buchanan is gaining wide appeal as a dynamic young artist with extraordinary musicality. Learn more about Maya.
Program
La La Land Concert Suite (7 minutes ) – John Hurwitz – Orch. Justin Hurwitz
Violin Concerto in D Major, op. 35 (24 minutes) – Erich Korngold
Maya Anjali Buchahan, Violin
Mission: Impossible Themen (3 minutes) – Lalo Schifrin – Arr. Calvin Custer
Casablanca Suite (7 minutes) – Max Steiner
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Suite for Orchestra III. Nimbus 2000 IV. Harry’s Wondrous World (7 min) – John Williams
Titanic Suite (13 min) – James Horner
Andra Pantelimon, Vocalist
Suite from Far and Away (8 min) – John Williams
About the Show
LaLa Land Concert Suite. . . Justin Hurwitz
(Born January 22, 1985, in Los Angeles, California)
Justin Hurwitz grew up in California until his family moved to Wisconsin, where, in Glendale, he attended Nicolet High School. His music education began early: “I started taking piano lessons when I was about 6,” Hurwitz said. “I started composing when I was 10. My parents got me a synthesizer and a floppy-disc sequencer, this basic piece of technology where you can record tracks and layer tracks on top of each other. I was really passionate about it for a couple of years, then lost interest in composing for some reason and didn’t do it in high school.” When it came time to go to college, he decided he should pursue music at Harvard University. Hurwitz said, “There was no other school subject I was particularly good at or that interested me. … I loved movies and the music in movies, and a lot of the best music, especially instrumental orchestral music, is being composed in movies. So, I went into college with the goal of being able to get into that field.”
At Harvard, he met Damien Chazelle, an aspiring film director. “We would talk about movies he wanted to make and music I wanted to write, and how we could combine what we do,” Hurwitz said. Many years later, their vision finally metamorphosed into the hit musical about artistic dreams in Hollywood, La La Land.
His freshman year, he and Chazelle, his friend and a drummer, started a band, but they had initially little success getting into film. We couldn’t get the movie made,” Hurwitz said.
“Nobody wanted to make a jazz musical [with] an unknown director and unknown composer. Even once Damien started to get some traction on it, they’d say, ‘Who’s doing the music?’ and he’d say, ‘My college roommate,’ and then that was even more unattractive a proposition. We couldn’t get it made.”
La La Land Concert Suite is a selection of themes from the Oscar-winning film of the same name. Hurwitz’s score, an homage to the golden age of Hollywood musicals, owes much to jazz but also was shaped by his classical music roots. As a teenager, Hurwitz studied piano with Stefanie Jacob, a frequent substitute keyboardist with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.
Hurwitz spoke about his musical evolution, “It’s not really a direct influence, but I love Beethoven,” he said. “And Tchaikovsky and Berlioz – and Gershwin was an influence, the way he blended jazz and classical,” but it was not until he studied music theory at Harvard that Hurwitz could understand “the grammar behind jazz, all those weird crunchy chords.”
Unlike most movie composers, Hurwitz does all his own orchestration. “It was a ton of work, but I loved that part of the process,” he said. “It’s all about dialogue, as the instruments speak to each other.” He admires the composers for the French New Wave films, who created counterpoint in which instrumental lines “rub against each other in ways that contemporary film composers don’t let them.”
The songs to La La Land were built out of “hundreds and hundreds of piano demos,” Hurwitz said. “We’d have a song that was done, then we’d say, ‘I think we can do better’ and throw it out and start from scratch.” Once Hurwitz and Chazelle agreed that they had a melody that would fit a moment in the film, they would send it to lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, an unusual method of working, since Hurwitz said, “Usually music and lyrics happen at the same time, or in the same room.”
The purely orchestral soundtrack for La La Land serves the same function as the songs, to help tell the story. “Every score cue was built on melodic material,” Hurwitz said. “None of it was purely situational.” In fact, the way that Hurwitz and Chazelle brought back melodies in new forms is reminiscent of Wagner’s use of leitmotifs.
“The very first material I composed for the movie is the main theme of the movie,” Hurwitz said. “As soon as Damien started writing the script, he wanted to know what is the main theme, the thing that we now call ‘Mia and Sebastian’s Theme.’ That was the first thing I composed in the movie.”
Concerto for Violin & Piano, Op. 35 in D Major . . . Erich Korngold
(Born May 29, 1897, in Brno, Czechoslovakia; died November 29, 1957, in Hollywood, California)
Before World War 1, Erich Korngold became one of the most popular and successful composers of his time in Europe. He composed for the concert and dramatic stages and was appointed to Vienna’s most distinguished professorship. When Nazi Germany invaded Austria in 1938, Korngold was working on a movie score in California and decided to remain there. Over 20 years, he wrote 21 extraordinary film scores and won two Academy Awards. In his later years, he returned to concert music: after World War II, he composed a string quartet, a symphony, and a violin concerto.
This concerto marked his transition away from his exclusive concentration on film music. Korngold composed the concerto in 1945 at the urging of Polish violinist Bronislaw Huberman, drawing on material from his film scores for Anthony Adverse and Another Dawn, written in 1939. On February 15, 1947, Jascha Heifetz and the St. Louis Symphony gave the premiere of the Violin Concerto, dedicated to Alma Mahler-Werfel. Korngold wrote a tribute to Heifetz, “In spite of the demand for virtuosity in the finale, the work with its many melodic and lyric episodes was contemplated rather for a Caruso than for a Paganini. It is, needless to say, how delighted I am to have my concerto performed by Caruso and Paganini in one person: Jascha Heifetz.”
The first eloquent theme comes from the film score to Another Dawn; the second theme borrows from his Juarez, one of whose sources was a novel by Franz Werfel, the late husband of the concerto’s dedicatee. The second movement, entitled “Romance,” an elegant and lyrical cantabile, takes material Korngold had used in Anthony Adverse, and for which he received an Oscar. After the gigue-like beginning of the last capricious movement, a rondo, the title music for The Prince and the Pauper, another film score, makes up the second theme.
Mission: Impossible. . . Lalo Schifrin (arr. Custer)
(Born June 21, 1932, in Buenos Aires; died June 26, 2025 in Los Angeles)
Lalo Schifrin, a celebrated Argentine composer and jazz pianist, composer, and conductor, wrote the iconic theme for the original Mission: Impossible television series in 1966. His theme is
noted for its 5/4 time signature and spy-thriller style. Schifrin became known for his combining rhythm, texture, instrumentation, and melody in a powerful and unique way. He scored episodes for more than a hundred films and TV shows, and provided theme music for quite a few, including Starsky & Hutch, Mannix, and most notably, for a tense TV spy series that launched an even tenser film spy series.
Schifrin grew up in Buenos Aires, surrounded by music. His father played violin in the Teatro Colon Opera, so Schifrin’s early piano training was classical, but he also played with tango-master Astor Piazzolla, represented Argentina in an international jazz festival in Paris, and started a 16-piece jazz band while he was still in his 20s. Meeting Dizzy Gillespie spurred Schifrin to compose a piece he called “Gillespiana,” and not long after that, Gillespie brought him to the U.S. as his arranger. Schifrin had extensive background in jazz, and also worked as] pianist for Gillespie in the 1950’s. He also performed then with Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, and Count Basie. From there, Hollywood was next.
More recently, he was equally at home conducting a symphony orchestra, performing at an international jazz festival, scoring a film or television show, or creating works for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra or the London Philharmonic. He was nominated for the Grammy twenty-one times.
The London Philharmonic Orchestra recorded Shifrin’s Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra, with Angel Romero. Schifrin conducted his Dances Concertantes for clarinet and orchestra at the Pyramids of Teotihuacan in Mexico with Placido Domingo as the tenor soloist. He was
commissioned to write the Grand Finale for the Three Tenors, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Jose Carreras, when they sang together for the first time. His Piano Concerto No. 2 was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, in Washington, D.C. at the Kennedy Center. Among Schifrin’s most recent commissions are the Fantasy for Screenplay and Orchestra for Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony and Symphonic Impressions of Oman, commissioned by the Sultan of Oman for the London Symphony. Orchestra.
Schifrin’s iconic theme song to Mission Impossible uses a subdivision of the bar into a lilting three-beat phrase followed by heavy accents on beats 4 and 5. It has been said that Schifrin learned rhythm from Morse Code, thus the 5/4 tempo just came naturally to him. His use of rhythm is forceful, yet the listener never feels comfortable.
His first attempt at Mission Impossible’s main theme, composed in march rhythm, unexpectedly was rejected. When time began to run out and the deadline approached, Schifrin simply sat down at his desk, not at a piano, and composed the now classic song in, reportedly, about 90 seconds. The vamp (a vamp is a chord progression repeats over and over providing a groove that someone can improvise over) is crucial to the effect he achieved, but Schifrin also added some nice touches, a bongo beat and an unexpected flute part. Schifrin was given simple directions that said that the credit sequence opens with the lighting of a bomb’s fuse, and that he should write “something exciting.”
Mission: Impossible always began with a flaring match, a lit fuse, and the words, “this tape will self-destruct in five seconds,” but fundamentally, the flute glissando and the distinctly Latin beat that Schifrin added are what always initiated the action.
Casablanca Suite . . .Max Steiner
(Born on May 10, 1888, in Vienna; died December 28, 1971, in Los Angeles,) Maximilian Raoul Steiner was an Austrian composer and conductor who emigrated to America and became one of Hollywood’s greatest musical composers. He is often referred to as “the father of film music”; he composed over 300 film scores and was nominated for 24 Academy Awards, winning three. He was the first recipient of the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
Steiner was an only child and grew up in a wealthy business and theatrical family of Jewish heritage. His father encouraged his musical talent and allowed him to conduct an American operetta at the age of twelve. Steiner became a full-time professional, proficient at composing, arranging, and conducting by the time he was fifteen. Steiner’s parents sent him to the Vienna University of Technology, but he expressed little interest in scholastic subjects. He enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Music in 1904, where, due to his prodigious and precocious musical talents as well as to private tutoring from Robert Fuchs and Gustav Mahler, he completed a four-year course in just one year, winning himself a gold medal from the academy when he was fifteen. He studied various instruments including violin, double bass, organ, and trumpet, but his preferred instrument was the piano. To explain why he studied so many instruments, he acknowledged the importance of being familiar with what the other instruments could do as important preparation for composing.
Having studied classical music, Steiner went first to London, where he conducted popular music revues (including one with Fanny Brice). In England, he wrote and conducted theater productions and symphonies, but when World War I began, he was interned as an enemy alien. Fortunately, the Duke of Westminster, who was a fan of his work, helped him attain exit papers so he could to go to America. He arrived in New York City in December 1914 with only $32. Unable to find work, he accepted menial jobs such as a copyist for Harms Music Publishing. In New York, he worked with George and Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern on Broadway, increasing his knowledge of popular song styles and orchestration. In 1929, he moved to Hollywood, where he became one of the first composers to write music scores for films.
At the time when Hollywood was just transitioning from silent movies to talkies, Steiner first worked at RKO as a composer, arranger, and conductor. In 1933, he had become a pioneering composer and created the score to King Kong, establishing music as a presence in movies. King Kong, called the first great movie score, included leitmotifs, surging accompaniment to action sequences, and touching love music, all in a late Romantic style like that of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Wagner. Steiner is credited with having changed what people expected from film music: melodic themes associated with specific characters and more evident underscoring of the whole film. The Steiner idiom became the Hollywood norm; it was used by such master composers as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Franz Waxman. Steiner wrote music for iconic films like Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, and the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, composing in a wide range of styles and always supporting the action and emotion on screen.
The score for Casablanca, which eventually earned an Academy Award nomination, originally presented a problem for him. Included in the script was the song “As Time Goes By,” a jazz song written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931. Although Steiner hated the song, the producer insisted on
including it. Not only did Steiner not like the song, he thought that it was not appropriate for the film; nevertheless, “As Time Goes By” remained and became emblematic of the film itself. Steiner’s adaptation became a classic example of a film composer transforming pre-existing musical material into something greater and more impactful than anyone thought possible. “As Time Goes By” became the love theme, the heart of Steiner’s Oscar-nominated score.
Steiner’s various renditions of the song “As Time Goes By” add up to a third of the forty minutes of music that he composed and arranged for Casablanca. One of the most thoughtful of film composers, Steiner masterfully wove the music into a score that illuminates and connects the film’s political and romantic conflicts. The song becomes the movie’s theme; Steiner had created something much more significant than just including the song as a popular standard that reappears. He made it a symbol of fulfillment, a melody expressing the happiness that comes with love. Because Rick and Ilsa’s love remains unfulfilled, it is a melody that is fragmentary and unfinished, sometimes sad, sometimes brooding, and even angry. It is a connecting link to the past in which the sense of fulfillment was imminent but somehow slipped away.
The amount of material that he needed to compose did not trouble him, but the music that was already built into the drama that he had to incorporate in a meaningful way was challenging to him. Steiner also incorporated nearly twenty minutes of popular music of the era.
Two other non-original songs were very important: “Wacht am Rhein,” a German patriotic anthem, and “The Marseillaise,” France’s national anthem, which became a symbol of French
determination to overcome the Nazis. One of the film’s most dramatic and dynamic musical sequences is the famous contest of anthems in Rick’s Café.
Approximately half of the music for Casablanca was Steiner’s own original material including a colorful opening, set against a map of Africa; poignant music to indicate the plight of the refugees; menacing sounds for the Nazis marching into Paris; a heroic motif for Laszlo; and exotic music for Ferrari’s Blue Parrot club.
Above all, Steiner created a score that masterfully adds to the political and romantic conflicts and themes of the film.
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone Suite, III & IV. . . John Williams
(Born February 8, 1932, in Flushing, New York)
John Williams is a pre-eminent American film composer and conductor, the son of a film studio musician. He attended UCLA and Los Angeles City College, where he studied composition with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. After service in the Air Force, he returned to New York to attend Juilliard, where he studied piano with Rosina Lhevinne. While in New York, he worked as a jazz pianist, both in clubs and on recordings. On returning to Los Angeles, he began his career in the film industry, writing music for many television programs and winning four Emmy awards for his work. To date, Williams has been awarded five Oscars, three British Academy awards, eighteen Grammys, three Golden Globes, four Emmys, and numerous gold and platinum records.
In January 1980, Williams was named conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. He currently holds the title of Boston Pops laureate conductor, which he assumed following his retirement in December 1993. He also holds the title of artist-in-residence at Tanglewood.
In addition to leading the Boston Symphony at Symphony Hall and at Tanglewood, Williams has been guest conductor with a number of major orchestras, including the London Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Dallas Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the latter of which he has conducted many times at the Hollywood Bowl. He made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1984 at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.
Williams holds honorary degrees from nineteen American universities, including Berklee College of Music in Boston, Boston College, Northeastern University, Tufts University, Boston University, the New England Conservatory of Music, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the Eastman School of Music, and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
Until movies had sound, incidental music was not very demanding, as it did not have to complement the action or create an effect synchronized to the specific action of the moment. Now, the art of composing for the film is much more complex, and Williams has helped to give film composition viability and visibility. His output is voluminous and varied, ranging from the music to Goodbye, Mr. Chips to Valley of the Dolls, from Jurassic Park through Jaws to ET. He has written all his film music for symphony orchestra rather than for electronic instruments.
Williams composed the music for the Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, during the spring and summer of 2001, mainly at Tanglewood. He elicited childhood magic in the scintillating fantasy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a score that not only matches the whimsy of the story but also evokes its sense of yearning. The first film in the beloved Harry Potter series, based on J. K. Rowling’s best-selling novels, follows young Harry when he discovers his magical heritage and begins his education at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The film introduces a world of enchantment, adventure, and friendship, and it sets the stage for the rest of the series.
Williams wrote the music for the first three Harry Potter films, masterfully capturing the magical, vaguely mysterious, and often playful tone of J.K. Rowling’s characters and stories. In this concert, two selections from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone represent the suite: “Nimbus 2000” and “Harry’s Wondrous World.”
The third movement of the suite features a short little fugue and includes one of the most popular musical themes of the film, “Nimbus 2000,” the flying theme. It focuses on a harmonic progression relying on the Neapolitan sixth, the augmented sixth, and chromatic mediant chords, which have often been signifiers of fantasy and illusion in music. It emphasizes the enchantment and curiosity at the core of the Potter stories through its orchestration. “Nimbus 2000” makes the woodwinds shine as Harry’s magical flying broomstick comes to life. Williams writes: “The Nimbus 2000 is Harry Potter’s own personal broomstick. To musically depict this ingenious mode of transportation we have the woodwind section, with its flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, all capable of extraordinary leaps and astonishing agility, forming a perfect match for the nimble Nimbus 2000.”
The suite ends with “Harry’s Wondrous World,” a summary in which the entire orchestra explores many of the themes heard throughout. Although “Harry’s Wondrous World” reprises many enchanting melodies and magical themes introduced in the first film, it returns again in the second of the series.
Titanic Suite. . .James Roy Horner
(Born August 14, 1953, in Los Angeles, California; died there, on June 22, 2015)
James Roy Horner was an American film composer who worked on more than 160 film and television productions between 1978 and 2015 and was known for the integration of choral and electronic elements alongside traditional orchestrations, as well as his use of motifs associated with Celtic music.
Horner won two Academy Awards for his musical compositions for James Cameron ‘s Titanic (1997), which became the best-selling orchestral film soundtrack of all time. He also wrote the score for the highest grossing movie of all time, Cameron’s Avatar (2009). Horner’s other Oscar-nominated scores have been for Aliens (1986), An American Tail (1986), Field of Dreams (1989), Apollo 13 (1995), Braveheart (1995), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and House of Sand and Fog (2003).
Horner began playing piano at the age of five. He also played violin. He spent his early years in London, where he attended the Royal College of Music and studied with György Ligeti. He returned to America, where he attended Verde Valley School in Sedona, Arizona, and later received his bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Southern California. After earning a master’s degree, he began work on a doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After several scoring assignments with the American Film Institute in the 1970s, he taught a course in music theory at UCLA, then turned to film scoring. In 1982, he was asked to score Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Horner’s biggest critical and financial success came in 1997 with his score for Cameron’s Titanic for which he received the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score and shared the Oscar for Best Original Song with co-writer Will Jennings for “My Heart Will Go On.” The film’s score and song also won three Grammy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
While flying his Short Tucano turboprop aircraft, Horner, an avid pilot, was killed in a single-fatality crash when he was 61. He was the only occupant of the aircraft when it took off after fueling at Camarillo Airport. The scores for his final three films, Southpaw (2015), The 33 (2015) and The Magnificent Seven (2016) were all completed and released posthumously.
“Adventure” is the main theme of the first third of the score. It simultaneously is used for Brock Lovett’s quest to find the Heart of the Ocean and for the excitement of the passengers of the Titanic who were departing on a cruise toward a new life. “Memories,” however, is much closer to being the main theme of the whole score. It is a reflective piece that often functions as the love theme. The love theme has a clear association with “My Heart Will Go On.” “Southampton” has many motifs and mostly uses synthesizer voices. It is associated with the grandeur and the technical marvel of the Titanic as it leaves for its maiden voyage.
Far & Away Suite. . . John Williams
Far and Away is a 1992 American romantic adventure drama film directed by Ron Howard from a script by Howard and Bob Dolman. It stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in a saga of Irish immigration to America in the 1890s. Cruise and Kidman play Irish immigrants seeking their fortune. Drawing on the rich tradition of Irish music as inspiration, John Williams uses original themes, but gives them an Irish style, creating a sweeping film score that beautifully captures and enhances the moods portrayed in the film and incorporates the film’s romance, action.
This suite is derived from the summary music played during the roll of the end credits of the 1992 movie. The strong Irish ethnicity of the opening location in County Galway introduces the composition. The conflicts of commoners and gentry come forth as the lead characters form a pact to emigrate to the freedom of America. Williams’ music takes the action and adventures through Boston and on to the land rush of the Oklahoma Territory. The rough life of the frontier and its settlers is contrasted with the pastoral scenes of the prairie. The music and the film conclude on a distinctly upbeat theme for a bright future.
The score, a mixture of traditional Irish instrumentation and conventional orchestration, prominently featured performances by the Irish musical group The Chieftains and a revision of the song Book of Days composed and performed by Enya. Far And Away includes much diversity in the structure and the instrumentation of the pieces: intimate pieces like the “County Galway, 1892” playful Irish jigs, as well as big orchestral pieces like “The Land Race” to music that could only be described as pure Americana.
Williams explained, “After seeing John Ford’s classic film The Quiet Man as a youngster many years ago, I had always aspired to write a film score based on an Irish subject. When Ron Howard asked me to score his film Far and Away, I immediately realized that my opportunity had arrived.”
“Given the richness of Irish vernacular music, the challenge to create original melodies in the Irish style was a daunting one. Nevertheless, it was a challenge I particularly enjoyed and had great fun with.
“I wrote one theme attempting to depict County Galway circa 1892, another describing the ‘fighting Donelly’s,’ a love theme for the characters Joseph and Shannon (played respectively by Cruise and Kidman), and a ‘blowing off steam’ fight theme that accompanies the typically Irish fun-filled ‘donnybrook’ that was so perfectly realized in the film.
“My fondest hope is that orchestras and audiences might derive even a fraction of the pleasure from this music that I had in writing it.’