Home Alone, a moderately budgeted film by a little-known director, was expected to be a minor hit for the Christmas season when it was released in November 1990. Instead, the film starring Macaulay Culkin became a holiday sensation, holding the No. 1 spot at the North American box office for 12 consecutive weekends, remaining in theaters until the following June, and spending 27 years at the top of the all-time, highest-grossing, live-action comedies in the United States.
Back by popular demand, the modern classic starring Macaulay Culkin returns to the Grand Rapids Popsstage for one night only at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12, in DeVos Performance Hall.
Associate Conductor John Varineau will conduct the concert that’s part of the Gerber SymphonicBoomseries, which continues in December with the Old National Bank Cirque de Noelon Dec. 18-19. Gerber is the series sponsor for both programs.
For the second year in a row, the Grand Rapids Pops performs John Williams’ score with its hummable melodies that evoke a child’s view of family and Christmas in the Midwest.
Screenwriter John Hughes had the idea for Home Alone while writing and directing the 1989 film, Uncle Buck. Culkin, who had a starring role in the film, inspired Hughes to create the precocious protagonist, Kevin McCallister.
Lukas Kendall, founder and editor of Film Score Monthly, told NPR, “[John Williams] has a breadth and depth of talent and career that really started before there were The Beatles; [today he is] essentially the dean of American composers. His themes sound inevitable. They sound like they fell out of his sleeves; they sound like they’ve always existed.”
Williams sets Home Alone apart from other live-action, comedies meant for the entire family with music that’s imaginative and memorable, capturing both the rambunctious nature of the film and the essence of the holiday spirit.
Tickets
Tickets for Home Alone start at $18, available by calling the GRS ticket office at (616) 454-9451 ext. 4. Phone orders will be charged a $3 per ticket handling fee ($18 maximum per order). There are no fees for tickets purchased in person at the GRS ticket office at 300 Ottawa Ave. NW, Suite 100, (located across the street from Calder Plaza). Ticket office hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
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 may be purchased online at GRSymphony.org.
It began with a brilliant fanfare that jolted you out of your seat, followed by an epic trumpet solo backed by a full symphony orchestra. Before either Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader spoke a line or appeared on screen, John Williams’ Grammy Award-winning score set the stage for the 1977 film Star Wars.
It was the birth of the blockbuster film and the return of soaring symphonic scores to accompany epic space adventures, heroic journeys across middle earth, and forays into the world of magic on the silver screen.
The Grand Rapids Symphony goes where no orchestra has gone before with highlights from such favorites as the 1978 film Superman starring Christopher Reeve, and the main themes from the Star Trek franchise including TV shows as well as movies.
Principal Pops Conductor Bob Bernhardt leads performances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, May 10-11, and at 3 p.m. Sunday May 12, in DeVos Performance Hall. Guest Artist sponsor is Pinnacle Construction.
Special guest vocalist Mela Sarajane Dailey joins the Grand Rapids Symphony to sing Can You Read My Mind? from Superman. The Grammy Award-winning singer, who first appeared with the Grand Rapids Symphony for its Holiday Pops in 2015, also sings two show-stopping operatic arias, the “Mad Scene” from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, and Vissi d’arte from Verdi’s Tosca.
“Live long and prosper” by attending the last Grand Rapids Symphony Pops concert which will feature music from “Star Trek. (Grand Rapids Symphony/Terry Johnston)
Bernhardt, who became Grand Rapids Symphony’s Principal Pops Conductor in 2015, is a personal friend of John Williams. When Williams served as conductor of the Boston Pops from 1980 to 1993, he hired Bernhardt in 1992 for the first time as a guest conductor to lead the Boston Pops. Last summer, Bernhardt marked his 25th anniversary with the Boston Pops.
Today, John Williams, a five-time Academy Award winner and a 51-time nominee for the Oscar for film composition, is famous for such films as the Indiana Jones series, the first two Jurassic Park films. In the mid-1970s, Williams was a rising star who won the Oscar for the 1974 film Jaws.
To compose music for the first Star Wars film and another eight films in the franchise that would follow, Williams revived the practice of composing leitmotifs or “leading motifs” to represent each character. Star Wars fans are familiar with The Imperial March and know that it’s Darth Vader’s theme. The main theme for Star Wars actually is Luke Skywalker’s theme, and the theme is heard in the score when Skywalker first appears on screen.
Williams used the same technique, which dates back to the 19th century operas of Richard Wagner, in such franchises as Harry Potter, in which key themes appear over and over across all eight films.
Grand Rapids Pops’ Star Wars, Star Trek, Middle Earth and More! includes music from the latest Star Warsinstallments including the 2015 film Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, the 2016 film, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and the 2017 film Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
The concert also includes music from the 2013 film Star Trek Into Darkenss and a medley of music spanning the entire Star Trek franchise.
Bernhardt will lead the Grand Rapids Pops in a suite of melodies from The Lord of the Rings films, all composed by Howard Shore, who won Oscars for the first film in the series, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and for the third film, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
Tickets
Single tickets for the Fox Motors Pops series start at $18 and are available at the Grand Rapids Symphony box office, weekdays 9 a.m.-5 p.m. 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.
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.
“Star War” guests mingle with Grand Rapids Symphony patrons before the performance.
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 501st 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.
More mixing and mingling with the “Star Wars” Darth Sidious and Darth Vader.
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.
Grand Rapids Pops presentsE.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with a full-length screening of the entire movie, coupled with a live performance of the film score Nov. 4-6 at DeVos Performance Hall.
For the two or three people out there who’ve never seen E.T., the film tells the tale of a gentle alien who is accidentally stranded on Earth. Discovered and befriended by Elliott, who brings his new friend to his suburban California home, E.T. soon falls ill. But with the help of his brother and sister, Elliott manages to keep E.T. hidden from the government long enough for the visitor to return home.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was a huge hit when it was released in 1982. The film by Steven Spielberg quickly surpassed Star Wars as the top-grossing film of all time until it was topped 11 years later by Jurassic Park. The three films all have two things in common: All three are Spielberg films and all three have film scores composed by John Williams.
“He is my hero,” said Grand Rapids Symphony Principal Pops Conductor Bob Bernhardt, about the five-time Oscar-winning film composer of more than 100 film scores.
Williams uses the ethereal sounds of harps, celeste, other keyboards plus some polytonality, to suggest the separate but intertwined relationship between Elliot and E.T.
Grand Rapids Symphony’s Principal Harpist Elizabeth Wooster Colpean has been studying and practicing her part — some 90 pages of music — since May. Williams gives the harpist at least four or five major solo passages, including two scenes that are nearly an entire harp solo.
“I’ve noticed in the years I’ve watched John Williams’s films that he often uses the harp in very unusual ways,” Colpean said. “What makes these particular scenes challenging is three-fold: rhythms, technique and the fact that it’s so exposed.”
Grand Rapids Symphony Associate Conductor John Varineau leads the Grand Rapids Pops performance of the score that won Williams his third Oscar and his second for Best Original Music.
The inspiration for the 1982 film, which launched the career of actress Drew Barrymore, was an imaginary friend Spielberg created after his parents’ divorce in 1960. It has inspired young people of all ages ever since.
The final scenes of E.T. proved to be a milestone in Williams’s career and 40-year association with Spielberg. During the recording process, after Williams made several unsuccessful attempts to match his score to the film, Spielberg turned the film off and asked Williams to conduct the music for the scene as he would in a concert. Instead of the usual practice of recording the soundtrack to coincide with the final edit of the film, Spielberg re-edited the finale to match the music.
One of the most popular and successful American orchestral composers of the modern age, Williams’s films also include such dramas as Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan as well as comedies including Home Alone and The Witches of Eastwick. Besides his five Academy Awards, Williams has received 50 Oscar nominations — most recently for Star Wars: The Force Awakens — making him the Academy’s most-nominated living person and the second-most nominated person in its history.
In January 1980, Williams was named Conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, after which he hired Bernhardt as a guest conductor for the Boston Pops. Though Williams retired in December 1993, Bernhardt continues as a recurring guest conductor for the venerable orchestra.
Bernhardt will be back in Grand Rapids for the Wolverine Worldwide Holiday Pops with five performances featuring the Grand Rapids Symphony Chorus, Youth Chorus, and Embellish Handbell Ensemble, December 1st to 4th in DeVos Performance Hall.
Tickets
See the movie that won four Academy Awards — including Best Original Score — at 8 pm Fridayand Saturday, Nov. 4and5, and at 3 pm Sunday, Nov. 6 in DeVos Performance Hall, 303 Monroe Ave NW, Grand Rapids, MI 49503.
Tickets start at $18 and are available at the GRS ticket office, weekdays 9am to 5pm 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 also available at the DeVos Place box office, weekdays 10am to 6pm 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 Passport program. This is a MySymphony360-eligible concert.
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend a performance of music of the great John Williams by the Grand Rapids Symphony and the Grand Rapids Choir. As one of my favorite composers, it was magical to hear his work.
The performance centered around his great songs over the years from many different films. In between songs, the conductor mentioned some interesting facts about John Williams. Did you know that John Williams has received the Olympic Order? The Olympic Order is the highest award at the Olympics. Or another one, did you know that John Williams will be receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award this year and that it will be the first time a composer has won the award?
While the newfound knowledge about my favorite composer added to his legacy, it was the performance of his music that solidified why he’s my favorite.
The first act included “March” from Superman, “Anakin’s Theme” from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, “Theme from Schindler’s List”, and “Flight to Neverland” from Hook. Towards the end of “Anakin’s Theme”, Darth Vadar and the Stormtroopers came out and interrupted the show. The conductor followed suit and played the “Imperial March” at the request of the ruler of the galaxy.
Then came the first intermission.
After the break, the Grand Rapids Choir joined in on the fun and performed “Duel of the Fates” from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace – one of my favorites! I could just picture Obi-Want, Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Maul engaged in a life-or-death lightsaber battle on Naboo.
Following “Fuel of the Fates” came “Somewhere in My Memory” from Home Alone, “Dry Your Tears Afrika” from Amistad (one I did not know but loved it.), “Hymn to the Fallen” from Saving Private Ryan, and the main theme from the Olympics, “Call of the Champions.”
After a second intermission, the performances kept on coming! “Harry’s Wondrous World” from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, “Sayuri’s Theme” from Memoirs of a Geisha, Selections from Fiddler on the Roof, and for the first time since Star Wars: The Force Awakens hit theaters, “Rey’s Theme” and “March of the Resistance.”
While listening to all the works of music was special, I was personally hoping to hear Indiana Jones. However, the last song was played and I was left wanting more! Fortunately, the conductor came back out for an encore and satisfied my appetite with a playing of Indiana Jones.
It was an epic performance by the Grand Rapids Symphony and Grand Rapids Choir.
Katie works in the film industry as a camera operator and has worked on films like ‘All You Can Dream’, ‘Set Up’ and a TV show called ‘American Fallen Soldier.’ She loves helping WKTV with the Citizen Journalism team and working as a tech at Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. Katie loves working in the film industry and loves watching movies just as much!
By: Katelyn Kohane