The first serious composition John Williams ever tried to write was a piano sonata. He was 18, and training to be a concert pianist — with lofty dreams of studying under Rosina Lhevinne at Juilliard and playing Rachmaninoff with the New York Philharmonic.
He was also, at the time, playing jazz and writing charts for a band he had formed with high school friends. But as a curious musician, newly infatuated with Prokofiev, he wrote his sonata “tinkering around with what I took to be modernity,” Williams said in a recent interview, “thinking that I had discovered fourth chords — because they weren’t commonly used until about that period in American music.”
A lot has happened in the 75 years since. Williams did study with Lhevinne, a renowned piano teacher, but he traded his concert hall dreams for a stab at making jazz records and playing piano in Hollywood’s film studios, where it quickly became apparent what his true calling was: scoring films.
All the while, though, Williams, 93, quietly charted a classical path alongside his booming film career. And now he has written a concerto for the piano, a work haunted by ghosts — of the jazz past and his own life. The concerto is to have its premiere on Saturday at Tanglewood with Emanuel Ax and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andris Nelsons. A recording by Deutsche Grammophon is coming and other performances are already scheduled, including with the New York Philharmonic in February.
Williams’s classical output includes a symphony, chamber music and concertos for a dozen instruments (including flute, violin, cello and bassoon). And yet, Williams said, he never wanted to write one for his “friend,” the piano, because “I just thought it was impossible.”
“So much history of piano music,” he said, sitting near a Steinway at his home in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles where he has lived since the early 1970s. “So much in the history of music, piano, keyboard, digital, fingers — that anyone would be daunted, I think.”
So what helped him overcome his fears?
Turning 90, he said, bluntly.
That milestone, in 2022, was celebrated with a year of galas and hosannas; in an interview in The New York Times, Williams said he planned to write a piano concerto. When Ax, a top American pianist for more than 50 years, read that article, he sent Williams a letter saying he wanted to be involved.
“I am afraid I took the bull by the horns,” Ax, 76, said.
Williams wrote back the next day: “That’s great. I’m going to work on it, and I will send it to you.”
The two first met in 1994, at Tanglewood, when they performed Mozart’s Concerto for Three Pianos with Maria Tipo. Ax had heard a lot about “Johnny Williams” from their mutual friend, André Previn, especially what a good pianist he was.
Williams demurred when asked about his prowess as a player, although he said “a lot of people liked the sound I made.” He aspired to play like the German pianist Walter Gieseking, who was, Williams said, “a sublime player of French piano music.”
Of course Ax was also familiar with Williams’s prolific output of film scores. “I’ve seen pretty much every movie that he’s done music for except ‘Jaws,’ because I’m too scared,” Ax said. “But everyone tells me it’s a fabulous movie and that the music is amazing.”
They often saw each other at Tanglewood, Ax said, but he has mostly admired Williams from afar. For his part, Williams admired Ax’s mastery of the piano but also his modesty, a trait they share.
Williams had composed other classical works for piano; he wrote the solo fantasia “Conversations” for Gloria Cheng, and a “Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra” for Lang Lang.
Williams has always written concertos with specific players in mind; some were commissions, others surprise gifts. Whether writing for the harpist Ann Hobson Pilot, or the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, or the trumpet player Michael Sachs, composing for somebody Williams knows “broadens the way and lights it,” he said, “just knowing you’re going to have that glow on a few notes.”
When it came to writing his piano concerto, Williams, an insatiable student of history, was especially drawn to Ax’s musical heritage: Born to Polish parents in what is now Ukraine, Ax was taught by Mieczysław Munz, who studied with Georg von Lalewicz, who studied with Theodor Leschetizky, who studied with Liszt, who studied with Czerny — who studied with Beethoven.
“That is such a tradition,” Williams said. “Someone very aptly made the observation that Bach is the foundation of all piano music, and Liszt is the crowning mountain of piano repertoire and the technical idea of how to write for it, and together they make Beethoven possible.”
Williams often has a concept or a poem, or perhaps an image in mind when he writes a concert work, he said. He told Ax he might write something inspired by the trees of Tanglewood — which have sparked previous compositions — but decided instead to root the concerto in traces of three masters of jazz piano.
The first movement, “Introduction — Colloquy,” was informed by the playing style of Art Tatum. Williams said that “Art Tatum’s piano had about 120” keys. (A standard piano has 88.) As a teenager, Williams saw Tatum perform at a Los Angeles nightclub: “You thought, even if he’s playing at the center of the keyboard, why did it sound like Rachmaninoff? And it wasn’t bangy or loud. It was just beautiful, and big.”
The second movement, “Listening,” is haunted by the ghost of Bill Evans, who played with Miles Davis before embarking on a solo career in the 1960s, and whose sound was “velvety in the balance,” Williams said. The third movement, “Finale.presto,” has a hint of the Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson in it. Peterson had a feeling of “circus” to Williams — “which may be the definition of a concerto finale.”
Williams says these influences are just whispers, and the movements aren’t meant to be literal portraits of the pianists. (Their names are written in the score as performance directions.) Nor is it a “jazz concerto” in its grammar.
“You wouldn’t necessarily recognize any of these people just from the notes,” Ax said on a recent Zoom call from the Berkshires, where he was practicing the work. “The only thing, I guess, that will recall them is that all three movements are quite difficult.”
Williams started working on the concerto in late 2023 — “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he recalled thinking when he began — and gave it to Ax the next spring. Ax’s first impression on seeing the score, which opens with a series of cadenzas and contains many improvisatory solo passages: “It’s thorny,” he thought.
“It has nothing to do with ‘Star Wars,’” Ax added. “It’s his other way of writing music. So in a sense I was very comfortable with that, because I’ve done thorny music before. I just said, ‘OK, I have to practice a lot.’”
Audiences are often confused by the disparity between Williams’s melodic, populist film scores and his thorny concert music. Some listeners, though, will recognize that, just as there is more complexity and dissonance under the glinting surface of his film music, there is more lyricism and emotional expression under the craggy top branches of his concert repertoire.
If there is one thing that connects these two “sides” of Williams, it might be their relationship to the past.
One passage that Williams smuggled into the concerto belongs to Phineas Newborn Jr. — a largely forgotten jazz pianist who was influenced by Tatum and Peterson. When Williams was playing piano on the recording sessions for Henry Mancini’s TV series “Peter Gunn,” he sat every day next to Victor Feldman, an English vibraphone player.
Feldman was obsessed with a piece by Newborn. “I’ve got this piano thing,” Williams recalled him saying. “Nobody seems to be able to play it, but I want to get to play it with both hands.” Williams took the music home. “I fingered it,” he said. “It’s very difficult. And I played it for Victor, who was quite thrilled. He couldn’t believe it — he had finally found a victim that could trace this thing in both hands.”
That passage is in the new concerto. “Manny found it difficult also,” Williams said, referring to Ax. “He has a different fingering than mine.”
After health setbacks last year forced him to cancel many conducting appearances, Williams said that he would be attending the Tanglewood premiere, adding that he would most likely be a mixture of nervous and excited. As always when a new work debuts, he said he would no doubt second-guess some passages, but hopefully be pleasantly surprised by others.
In any event, Williams said, “I hope it makes its case.”
Tim Greiving is the author of “John Williams: A Composer’s Life,” coming in September from Oxford University Press.
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