I expected what I got with this CD. And somewhat less than that. Williams displays his usual expertise with effects and orchestration. We've grown to expect that. We've also come to expect one or two memorable (if mechanical) themes, and we get those. But the difference between this score and the three previous Lucas/Skywalker scores may be that Williams, like Lucas, no longer believes in his own mythology. Menace is a peculiarly enervated musical workout, as if Williams can no longer (he's 67 this year) get very enthused with cartoon - and now computer-generated - characters. One senses from the critical reaction to the film (I haven't seen it) that Lucas, too, is tired out by too long in the phantasmagorical outback.

I liked Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back somewhat less, and Return of the Jedi less still. As the Lucas Empire grew in proportion to their success, and the technological marvels increasingly took over, the pleasure of myth recognition diminished exponentially in the opposite direction. The original tale was confessed high-tech soup with eclectic ingredients, from Alexander Nevsky and The Thief of Baghdad to Laurel and Hardy and Disney. We seemed to respond subliminally to the barely disguised borrowings from both Hollywood and ancient mythologies. The technique was subservient to the taletelling. As the series progressed, the percentage of original material increased, with the concomitant technology outpacing Lucas' imagination. And so it was with Williams' music. The score for Star Wars was an eclectic meld, like the movie itself. The dramatic thrust and mystery of Holst's Planets with a heavy overlay of Rozsa and especially Korngold. Now let it be admitted that we owe much of the resurgence of the traditional Hollywood film score to Star Wars' phenomenal sales. But Williams seems to have been trapped in a symphonic straight jacket he himself designed. As a musician who started out in the orchestral jazz tradition of Previn, North and Bernstein (both Leonard and Elmer), and as Johnny Williams, he became John, and curtailed his options along with his name. Along the way, he inherited (by default) Korngold's vacant throne. The problem is that while Williams is enough of a pro to manufacture a traditional, echt-Hollywood sound, I don't sense that he feels the emotions that inspired and infused the orchestral sweep of Korngold, Steiner, Rozsa and Newman. Again, Williams is a keyboard player by training (he was the piano soloist in Newman's Fox orchestra forty years ago). The great romantic gestures, the arching Tchaikovskian string theme, do not seem to come naturally to him. One cannot but envy his abilities as orchestrator and conductor, but his themes, to these ears, always leave an impression of ersatz emotion, factory-Max and neo-Newman. There's often much to admire, but nothing to love.

Phantom Menace, however, is surprisingly bereft of that which grabbed us in his score for Star Wars - massive orchestral effects and romantic excess in the best Richard Strauss style (Williams even managed to write an affecting love theme for that least affecting of romantic heroines, Carrie Fisher). Aware of the absence of the former panache, some have praised Williams for a new subtlety. But do we want subtlety in a film titled The Phantom Menace? No, I suspect Williams is just a mite tired of the whole assembly-line aspect of the Lucas phenomenon but can't find a graceful way to turn down either George or the financial boon attached to it (how many redundant recordings of the first three Star Wars scores has he now done?).

For those readers who are not film music buffs, we might note that Orff's Carmina Burana has become to this generation what Rachmaninov was to the "Golden Age". That is, the well from which almost every film composer draws - therefore instant cliché. Williams has appropriated Carmina for his Duel of the Fates in the new score. Orff had one good idea, but sub-Orff (I resisted the more natural phrase, "fake Orff", just in case someone decides to read this paragraph out loud) - sub-Orff, I say, is decidedly less delicious than pseudo-Rachmaninov.