Music Review: Summon the Heroes by John Williams and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (on CD)

Summon the Heroes
by John Williams and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Compact Disc 781.68 Bos)

As I write this review, we are about halfway through the Tokyo Summer Olympics of 2021 (postponed from 2020 by the global pandemic). Ever since 1996, one of my every-other-year traditions during both the Summer Olympics and the Winter Olympics is to listen to this album on auto-replay for two straight weeks as the sporting events take place.

 

Summon the Heroes is both the album title and the title of the first track — which in 1996 was a newly created work by composer/conductor John Williams (yes, he of the many Oscar-winning soundtracks), in honor of the Centennial Celebration of the Modern Olympic Games in Atlanta, GA in July of that year. Overall, the disc contains twelve tracks, three of which are Williams’ music. Track three opens with Leo Arnaud’s “Bugler’s Dream”, which leads immediately into “Olympic Fanfare and Theme”, written by Williams for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games. And track #1 is “The Olympic Spirit”, a piece composed by Williams for the NBC Sports Division, in celebration of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. All three of Williams’ pieces feature a wide range of musical stylings, from challenging brasses and pulse-pounding percussion, to pensive woodwinds and striving strings — there’s a little thing in there for all types of athletic experience, from individuals struggling to complete a marathon, and gymnasts flying through the air like birds, to driving beats symbolizing the charge of the speed swimmer or the compulsive excitement of men and women testing the boundaries of human strength and endurance.

 

Admittedly, those are the three tracks I gravitate towards most often, considering that they are still heavily sampled for use in NBC’s ongoing Olympics television and streaming coverage of the games. But the disc does include 9 other tracks of music, some written specifically for the Olympics, and some just thematically appropriate: “O Fortuna” by Carl Orff; “Ode to Zeus” from Canto Olympico (for the 1992 games in Barcelona” by Mikis Theodorakis; “Javelin” by Michael Torke, written for the 1996 Atlanta games; “Olympic Theme” by Leonard Bernstein, written for the 1981 International Olympic Congress; “Festive Overture, Op. 96” by Dmitri Shostakovich, theme of the 1980 Moscow summer games, “Conquest of Paradise” by Vangelis; “Parade of the Charioteers from Ben Hur” by Miklos Rozsa; “Toward a New Life” by Josef Suk, Silver medal-winning composition at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and “Chariots of Fire (Theme)”, also by Vangelis, written for the 1981 film but also performed at the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo. I find most of these non-Williams’ tracks to be more about the fanfare and pageantry of the Games, and less about the experiences of the athletes themselves.

 

None-the-less, each of these pieces, in their own way, is inspirational and celebrational. But the three Williams tracks, clocking in at around 14 1/2 minutes total, get my pulse racing and put me in the mood to see the world’s greatest athletes pushing their limits. Of the hundreds of CDs (and digital albums) I own, I’ve probably listened to Summon the Heroes more often than any other…and it never fails to lift me up, no matter what mood I’m in!

[Note: Williams also composed yet another piece of Olympics music — “Call of the Champions” — for the 2002 Winter Olympics, after this 1996 album was released. I wish it was also on this disc!]

[If you enjoy this, I’d suggest listening to other John Williams works. But his soundtracks, tremendous though they are, are very much tied in to the films they were written for. The works he created for the Olympics seem to stand out as an entirely different field of music.]

[ Wikipedia page for John Williams (he doesn’t have an official website) ]

 

See the new Summer Olympics Reading List on BookGuide!

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Services

 

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