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
Have you listened to
this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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