By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 24, 2003; Page C01

"Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars, gimme them Star Wars, don't let them end . . ."

So sang Bill Murray's oleaginous nightclub crooner in an old "Saturday Night Live" sketch, taking one of the most popular purely instrumental themes of 1977 and adding his own inane improvised lyrics to it, Vegas style. And yet, Murray to the contrary, there's a lot more to composer John Williams than "Star Wars," as the National Symphony Orchestra proved last night in the first evening of its "Soundtracks" festival.

The program, titled "A Portrait of John Williams," was neatly bisected, with two of Williams's concert pieces -- "For Seiji!" and "The Five Sacred Trees: Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra" -- on the first half of the bill and a catchall of his best-known film scores ("Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Jaws," "Schindler's List" and "E.T.," among others) on the second. ("Star Wars" was one of the encores.) Williams conducted the NSO; the orchestra's music director, Leonard Slatkin, will lead a second presentation of this concert on Feb. 1.

Slatkin and Williams are the artistic directors of the "Soundtracks" festival, which will explore conjunctions of film and music back to a score written by Camille Saint-Saens for a silent film in 1908. The second program takes place this afternoon at 1:30, with further events tomorrow night, and on Thursday, Friday and Saturday of next week. (Information: 202-467-4600.)

It was especially illustrative to hear some of Williams's pure concert music -- pieces in which he has more than a few seconds to set a tone and that allow for some ambiguity of expressive intent. "For Seiji!" is a tribute to Seiji Ozawa, who was until recently the music director of the Boston Symphony. Not surprisingly, this is a showpiece for virtuoso orchestra -- proclamatory, skillfully wrought, easy on the ears and making judicious use of some Asian modes, presumably to reflect Ozawa's Japanese heritage.

"The Five Sacred Trees" is an ambitious concerto in five movements. As one of the very few such works for solo bassoon, it ought to prove very popular with reed players. It would be hard to imagine a finer performance than the one it was given by Sue Heineman, the NSO's principal bassoonist. For all of the score's eerie sound effects and daunting registral leaps, Heineman's playing was inevitably lyrical: She made the bassoon sing, now with pastoral sweetness, now with dry Mephistophelian elegance, now in a boggy bass croak. The NSO provided backing of unusual richness and variety; this composer knows a thing or two about orchestration.

Williams has written music for almost 100 films, but he is undoubtedly best known for his long collaboration with director Steven Spielberg, dating back almost 30 years. I confess a certain impatience with most of Spielberg's movies: For better and for worse, they are not quite adult, and the spurious, comic-book "boyhood" they evoke, for viewers of both sexes, was something I was happy to leave behind. (E.T., go home!)

Still, judged pragmatically and in the long tradition of incidental music, Williams's scores are unassailable; much as we may occasionally want to, we will not forget them. They work -- both as light bonbons in the tradition of Eric Coates, Albert Ketelbey and Leroy Anderson and as sonorous mottoes for the films they serve. (Who can imagine "Jaws" with a different soundtrack?) Moreover, the best piece of the second half -- a theme from "Schindler's List" played raptly by NSO concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef -- is steeped in the same warm, misty schmaltz we find in the violin miniatures of Fritz Kreisler.

Williams made a charming, self-effacing host, and a capacity audience cheered him as if he were Luke Skywalker.