LA Scene: Hollywood Bowl

(First in a series of occasional posts on what I think makes LA special)

Kansas Kari:

photo linked from http://parks.co.la.ca.us

On Friday night, I went with some friends to the Hollywood Bowl. The venue is LA’s famed big outdoor summer concert venue. Tuesdays and Thursdays are classical music nights. Wednesday is for jazz. Sunday is for world music. And Friday and Saturdays are for weekend spectaculars.

The Hollywood Bowl is an LA county park site.

Here are two web page articles on the history of the bowl. A short one and a longer one.

Friday’s program brought John Williams’ baton to the stage with the LA Philharmonic.

The opening number was a peppy rendition of Hooray for Hollywood. This was followed by a medley of snippets from Hollywood movie soundtracks ranging from his notable themes to ones dating to the old classic movies like Psycho and Casablanca and Magnificent Seven. I wish you could have been there as your encyclopedic knowledge of film and interest in music scores would have been helpful and besides, I think you would have simply just enjoyed the music, the venue and the company. I recognized most of the movies Williams spliced into the music mix. Alas, there were a few that were vaguely familiar but I couldn’t put a movie to it. At that point, it would have been great to have you there to whisper to me what movie it was from.

Williams then led the orchestra with three jazz soloists in playing three pieces from Catch Me If You Can. Williams told the story of how he convinced Spielberg to let him do a jazzy soundtrack. Spielberg wondered if Williams had much experience with that type of music. Williams replied, I did play piano for Henri Mancini early in my career.

The next set was four pieces from the Harry Potter films. After intermission, we then were treated to his most famous work: Star Wars. James Earl Jones provided narration to link the various musical numbers with the Star Wars story arc.

After the formal show ended, Williams and the Phil played three more movie themes. The first was from a film from the 1940s (I don’t recall the name) composed by Max Steiner and utilized extensive solo violin. Then Williams finished the night off with crowd-pleasing themes from Superman and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Should you visit LA when the Bowl is having events, we’ll be sure to go there.

Your Angelino Amigo,

Rene