By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 27, 2003; Page C05

The National Symphony Orchestra's "Soundtracks" festival continued over the weekend at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, with NSO Music Director Leonard Slatkin and film composer John Williams passing the baton between them.

On Friday afternoon, Slatkin led the first half of the program (film music by authenticated "serious" composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein); then Williams did the honors for the scores of Hollywood favorites Alfred Newman, Elmer Bernstein, Franz Waxman and Max Steiner, among others. Still, as Slatkin pointed out in his introductory remarks, all of these composers were classically trained: "They just chose different media to express themselves."

This is worth pondering, for writing for film is a very different discipline from writing for the concert hall, and great composers don't always make great movie music. Few would argue that Steiner's theme music to "Gone With the Wind" is on a level with Copland's best works (many of which are still virtually unknown to the public). And yet -- to this taste anyway -- it is infinitely more successful in what it sets out to do than Copland's scores for "The Red Pony" (played on Friday) and "The Heiress," for which he was awarded an Oscar. Indeed, it could be argued that Steiner's broad, memorable theme, repeated in various arrangements at key moments in "Gone With the Wind," is the element that holds this fluid pudding of a film together. Certainly, it isn't the acting (which is sometimes charming but unremarkable), nor can it be what then passed for spectacle that draws us back to "Gone With the Wind" 64 years on. Moreover, romantic nostalgia for the Confederacy, as certain politicians have recently learned to their detriment, is hardly a hot property these days. No, when I think of "Gone With the Wind," it is always with the theme playing -- indeed can you imagine it with any other music? Steiner's score inflates what might have been a protracted soap opera up into an epic and, for a moment, makes us believe. In other films, the music simply goes too far. I would nominate Maurice Jarre's score for "Lawrence of Arabia" as an example of an attractive composition so determinedly overused that its sumptuously orchestrated reiterations finally smother the drama. "Oh, no, not that again," we think as the strings start to swell.

Sometimes film music is most effective when it is most reductive -- for example, the searing solo cello in Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers," which is brought into play only at the emotional crisis of the film and then speaks more eloquently than any full orchestra (or, for that matter, than the characters' words, which are muted and disappear at just this moment). An underrated film from the early 1980s, "Shoot the Moon," with Diane Keaton and Albert Finney, is accompanied by a deliberately clumsy, one-finger piano plunking of "Don't Blame Me" by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh that mirrors the tentative awkwardness of longtime partners feeling their way through a bitter divorce.

It was interesting to hear Bernstein's Symphonic Suite from "On the Waterfront" on Friday. Bernstein hated the constraints of writing for Hollywood -- the way he had to make his musical points immediately and succinctly, the way his score was diced up to fit the screen action -- and he never ventured into the field again. Still, as Slatkin pointed out before the performance, this is one of Bernstein's strongest scores because of its concision: The violent, aggressive jostling of the music fits the gray gloom of Elia Kazan's moral fable. Bernstein was a composer who spent his life trying to perfect the Big Statement (in three symphonies and the gaseous "Mass") without fully realizing the miracles he had wrought in the best of his show music, such as the "Candide" Overture, most of "West Side Story" and this film score. (Or, as one wag observed, "Lenny can do anything he wants so long as he doesn't put his mind to it.")

Another fascination was Williams's own "Tribute to the Film Composer," which had the NSO audience smiling and nodding along from the first measures, yet would have proved absolutely mystifying -- musical gibberish, in fact -- if we hadn't recognized the references. Over the course of five minutes, Williams manages to breeze through 22 film themes (and fanfares from Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox) in what seems all but random order: "Titanic" to "Psycho" to "Jaws" to "The Pink Panther" to "Exodus" for no more than a few seconds apiece. Remember that inane advertisement for cotton that claimed, in weepy falsetto, that it was "the fabric of our lives"? Think again. "Tribute to the Film Composer" can pass as a collective experiential biography for our times -- and our "fabric" is celluloid.

The festival continues on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. For information call 202-467-4600 or visit www.kennedy-center.org