A Toast!

John Towner Williams was born February 8, 1932, in New York City and lives in Los Angeles. He composed A Toast! in 2014 to celebrate the announcement of Andris Nelsons as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s fifteenth music director. It was first performed under BSO Associate Conductor Marcelo Lehninger’s direction during the private event marking the appointment. The score is inscribed “Celebrating the 134th Anniversary of the B.S.O. and the appointment of its 15th music director, Andris Nelsons.”

A Toast! is scored for 5 trumpets, 6 horns, 4 trombones, 2 tubas, glockenspiel, and tubular bells; it’s about 3 minutes long.

The unparalleled film composer John Williams, in addition to his many Hollywood-based colleagues and friends, has a vast network of relationships across the musical universe, created over his nearly seven-decade career as pianist, arranger, conductor, and composer. As conductor of the Boston Pops for fourteen seasons (1980-1993), succeeding the legendary Arthur Fiedler, Williams became intimately acquainted with three generations or so of Pops and Boston Symphony Orchestra musicians along with the BSO’s long-tenured music director, Seiji Ozawa, and the Tanglewood and international eminence Leonard Bernstein. This past summer, the BSO and Tanglewood celebrated Williams’ 90th birthday with a tribute concert in the Koussevitzky Music Shed that featured several of his close musical friends, including Yo-Yo Ma, Branford Marsalis, and James Taylor.

That concert featured primarily music with strong ties to the BSO itself and included Tributes (for Seiji!) and To Lenny! To Lenny! (For New York), composed for the conductors Ozawa and Bernstein respectively. Williams has made a practice of writing both brief and more extended works for musicians he admires—such as his recent Violin Concerto No. 2, composed for the eminent violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and premiered by her with the BSO in 2021. A Toast! is on the smaller end of the scale, a three-minute piece for brass ensemble written in 2014 for a new friend, Andris Nelsons, with whom Williams has since developed a warm working relationship. Like Williams’ film music, A Toast! quickly sets a tone and gets at the expectant, exuberant heart of the matter, exchanging fanfare-like figures among the brass sections and building up bold forays for the whole ensemble, and in the process making listeners’ hearts beat a little bit faster.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.