By Jenn Collard

Grand Rapids Symphony

Film composer John Williams starts every Star Wars movie with a bang. With one iconic opening chord, viewers are instantly swept into a cinematic universe that’s held together not by one director or writer, but by one composer.

Williams, whose prodigious output of film and musical scores has earned him 24 Grammy Awards, five Academy Awards, and 41 Oscar nominations over the course of his 5 decades-long career, has defined, through music, the heroes and villains of more movie franchises than even Luke, Leia, or Harry could summon with all of their powers.

The Grand Rapids Pops presents Star Wars and More: The Music of John Williams with some of Williams’ best known music, with a few surprising melodies thrown in for good measure, on May 11-13 in DeVos Performance Hall, 303 Monroe Ave. NW. Shows are at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, May 11-12 and at 3 p.m. Sunday, May 13.

With musical selections from all 3 Star Wars trilogies, the concert features standout Star Wars pieces, alongside cherished songs from the Harry Potter film franchise, the Jurassic Park franchise, and several other films where Williams’ scores exquisitely craft the emotionality of characters and their world.

For the finale of this year’s Fox Motors Pops series, Principal Pops Conductor Bob Bernhardt will conduct the symphony in the formidable task of playing 14 selections from Williams’ scores.

The concert sponsored by the Peter C. & Emajean Cook Foundation features five selections from the Star Wars franchise, including one suite from The Force Awakens and the hopeful “The Rebellion is Reborn,” from The Last Jedi, the most recent installment of the final trilogy.

The Grand Rapids Symphony Youth Chorus, directed by Sean Ivory, will be featured with music including the dramatic “Battle of Heroes,” from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and the joyful “Exultate Justi” from Empire of the Sun. Sure to be a concert highlight, “Exultate Justi,” sung in Latin, is an ardent celebration of a young protagonist’s indomitable dignity and courage, earning Williams another Grammy and Academy Award nomination, respectively.

Costumed characters from the Star Wars franchise will patrol the lobby of DeVos Hall, greeting guests and posing for pictures at each show. Characters from the Great Lakes Garrison of the 501^st Legion, a worldwide Star Wars costuming organization, are expected to include Darth Vader, Kylo Ren, Rey, assorted Storm Troopers, and more.

John Williams, whose long tenure with the Boston Pops stretched for 14 seasons before he became the Pops’ Laureate Conductor, personally hired Bob Bernhardt as a guest conductor of the Boston Pops. So it makes sense that Bernhardt, who is in his third season as the Grand Rapids Symphony’s Principal Pops Conductor, is conducting works written by the man of whom Bernhardt has said, “He’s my hero.”

Williams, it seems, knows something of heroes and villains. Whether fictional or otherwise, Williams’ compositions, particularly for franchise films like Star Wars, feature short musical themes that identify characters, motivations, situations, and locations. Those themes, repeated again and again, help define characters as threating or hopeful; as brave or defiant or tender.

A menacing shark, for instance, has a two-note theme repeated throughout the score, and a villain is born for Jaws. A French horn solo, brief and longing, as a young man gazes out at a binary sunset on a desert planet introduces Luke Skywalker to Star Wars viewers.

The Julliard-trained Williams won his third Academy Award for Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. That original score, with its sweeping sonic landscape, helped define the entire Star Wars franchise and cinematic universe.

Drawing from numerous classical music influences – from Wagner to Tchaikovsky to Holst – Williams’ capability to write evocatively and create characters out of musical thin air seems to know no bounds.

Maestro John Reineke of the New York Pops, prior to a performance of the musical score for The Force Awakens in Carnegie Hall, summed it up: “John has a way to capture the visual element of the film, and the feelings, the emotions … and transfer that into music. So when you take the music out of the film,” he explained to AM New York, “and play it on a concert stage with no visuals and just listen to it, it takes you right back to that film and what it’s about – you can picture it in your mind.”

The final Star Wars trilogy, with The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, will see its final film premier in December 2019. Williams, now 86, says that the as-of-now untitled Star Wars IX, will be his last Star Wars film.

“We know J.J. Abrams is preparing one now for next year that I will hopefully do for him, and I look forward to it,” Williams said while speaking to University of Southern California’s Classical music radio station, KUSC. “It will round out a series of nine and be quite enough for me.”

Tickets

Tickets start at $18 and are available at the GRS ticket office, weekdays 9 am-5 pm at 300 Ottawa Ave. NW, Suite 100, (located across from the Calder Plaza), or by calling 616.454.9451 x 4. (Phone orders will be charged a $2 per ticket service fee, with a $12 maximum.)

Tickets are available at the DeVos Place box office, weekdays 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. or on the day of the concert beginning two hours prior to the performance. Tickets also may be purchased online at GRSymphony.org.

Full-time students of any age are able to purchase tickets for only $5 on the night of the concert by enrolling in the GRS Student Tickets program. This is a MySymphony360 eligible concert.