Branford, Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor and Eric Revis join the Boston Pops at Tanglewood to celebrate John Williams’ 90th Birthday
The Boston Globe / W. Anthony Sheppard
The piece that most clearly demonstrated Williams’s full stylistic range was “Escapades,” a three-movement orchestral score drawing on music from the 2002 Spielberg film “Catch Me If You Can” and featuring solo alto saxophone with vibraphone and double bass, performed here by Branford Marsalis, the BSO percussionist J. William Hudgins, and the jazz double bassist Eric Revis. The orchestral musicians’ snapping fingers near the start could not help but recall Bernstein’s “West Side Story” and the asymmetrical dance rhythm played by the full orchestra in the third movement was fully in Bernstein’s idiom. Marsalis delivered a consistently beautiful tone, and the audience responded with its loudest applause yet.