Naxos will issue John Williams and “The President’s Own” Vol. 1 & 2 on June 19, putting the composer’s Kennedy Center concerts with the United States Marine Band back into physical circulation. The two-disc release draws primarily from two gala sets Williams led at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and it will be the widest physical availability yet for the material.
The first concert was recorded on July 12, 2003, a day after the Marine Band’s 205th anniversary, and it gives the set its earliest backbone. Williams ran through selections from Star Wars, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Schindler’s List, alongside music from The Cowboys and the Harry Potter series. The program also included a suite from Catch Me If You Can, plus his Olympic fanfare, the theme from JFK and “Sound the Bells!”
That last piece had a history of its own. Williams wrote “Sound the Bells!” in 1993 for the marriage of the Japanese crown prince and princess, and here he folded it into a concert built around some of his most recognizable music. The disc also preserves the sweep of a live event that was not designed as a studio compilation but as a night at the hall, with Williams on the podium and the Marine Band meeting him phrase for phrase.
Five years later, Williams returned to the Kennedy Center with the Marine Band for a second gala concert. That program shifted toward tribute, with excerpts honoring Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and it moved through themes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Superman. It also included music from The Sugarland Express, 1941 and The Terminal, along with “Liberty Fanfare,” the work commissioned in 1986 for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty.
The new edition closes with a special 2013 recording of Williams with the Marine Band, an original composition he wrote for the ensemble’s 215th anniversary. That recording first surfaced when the Marine Band released the concert as a free download in 2018, but the physical Naxos set gives it a broader shelf life than before. The source material also makes clear that the new edition leaves out some of Williams’ commentary from the 2003 set and skips a performance of a then-new piece from the fourth Indiana Jones film that appeared in the 2008 concert.
That pruning matters because it shows what this release is trying to be: not a complete archive, but the most accessible package yet of Williams’ work with the Marine Band. For listeners who only knew these performances as a digital offering, the June 19 release turns them into something that can sit on a shelf, not just a screen. For the composer and the band, it restores a partnership that has already stretched from 2003 through 2013 and now reaches a wider audience in 2026.
