The Music of John Williams — Rady Shell San Diego

Close your eyes during the Imperial March and tell me you don't straighten your spine. Open them during the Hedwig's Theme and tell me you don't feel eleven years old, standing in a hallway that shouldn't exist. John Williams didn't write movie music. He wrote the emotional architecture of three generations, and on July 31 the San Diego Symphony Orchestra performs it live under the open sky.

Conductor David Newman leads the full orchestra through an all-Williams program at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park — the waterfront amphitheater where the bay stretches out behind the stage like it was designed for this exact purpose. Harry Potter. Indiana Jones. Star Wars. E.T. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Jaws. Each piece performed live while San Diego's skyline glows behind eighty musicians who know exactly what these notes mean to the people in those seats.

The Rady Shell sits on the harbor. The sound carries across the water. The program moves through decades of cinema like a highlight reel of every feeling you've ever had in the dark of a theater — except now the dark is a summer sky and the strangers beside you are all holding their breath at the same moment. Lawn seating. Table seating. Either way, by the time the brass reaches the Star Wars finale, nobody is sitting down.