Star Wars (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Phantom Menace)

Concert presentations of this kind typically string together the best-known themes from "A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back," and "The Phantom Menace" rather than following the films' plots in order. Listen for the "Main Title," the fanfare that opens "A New Hope," with its rising brass leap and full orchestra behind it, a theme that returns whenever the story wants to feel heroic. From "The Empire Strikes Back" comes the "Imperial March," built on a heavy, marching rhythm in the low brass, used to announce Darth Vader. Also drawn from that score is "Yoda's Theme," gentler and slower, carried by woodwinds. "The Phantom Menace" contributes "Duel of the Fates," a fast choral and orchestral piece built on pounding, chanted syllables over driving strings and percussion, written for the film's lightsaber battle. Because this is an arranged selection rather than a single composed work, the exact order and cuts can vary by performance and conductor, but the throughline is Williams's use of recurring melodies, called leitmotifs, to identify characters and moods across the films. Listeners familiar with the movies will recognize each entrance instantly; newcomers will hear how a simple melodic shape, repeated and reorchestrated, can carry an entire saga's worth of feeling.

John Williams composed the scores for "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977), "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980), and "The Phantom Menace" (1999) for director George Lucas, working with the London Symphony Orchestra on all three. The music was quickly extracted into concert suites and singles, and Williams himself has conducted selections from the scores at orchestral pops concerts for decades. Programs like this one gather highlights across the three films into a single concert set, a format many American orchestras now offer as part of film-music or "pops" series. The scores earned Williams several Academy Award nominations and wins, and the "Star Wars" music helped establish the modern tradition of large-scale orchestral scoring for blockbuster films, drawing new listeners into the concert hall through music they already knew from the screen.