Thinking of scores as a whole and not just cues that stand out, his finest two hours might be "Jaws" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (that might be a little over two hours of scoring though).
Favorite theme is the Imperial March. Best use of horns ever. His true genius was taking simple things and making them iconic. The previously mentioned Jaws theme is universal yet so simple. The same with Close Encounters. Just five simple notes yet everybody still knows it.
On that note, lately it's occurred to me that his way of composing the Imperial March must have been to take Chopin's Funeral March and turn it into a national anthem.
It's too hard for me to choose because I enjoy pretty much everything I've ever heard that he's written.
Tough call between Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Lost World. Just about all of his action cues from Indiana Jones are fantastic. "Duel of the Fates" is his best single piece but the Trade Federation theme is clearly a ripoff of his Nazi theme from Last Crusade.
This isn't really answerable for me. If I look at any of his score albums in their entirety there's always tracks I don't really care for (usually the more bombastic action cues). The best way I could approach it might be to say "this one has the least amount of tracks that I don't care for", and that's a kind of analytical project I'm not really interested in undertaking, heh. Not to mention that which ones I like the most could be heavily-dependent on my mood at the time. The albums I've enjoyed enough to pick up a copy of them: E.T. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (I'm less enamored with the first two) Raiders of the Lost Ark Jurassic Park Revenge of the Sith Schindler's List (an outlier from his more conventional scores to be sure) Attack of the Clones The Empire Strikes Back Superman
That's a tough one. I think I'd have to go with: Jurassic Park: The first John Williams CD I ever picked up so it holds a special place in my heart. Plus I think it's just an awesome score that's memorable without wearing out over time. Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Very different from your standard Williams' compositions but that's what I like about it. Not the easiest score to listen to but absolutely worthwhile, I think. JFK: I usually can't stand songs mixed in with the score but I think it works really well here. I always found this one really powerful to listen to.
My favorite is the Superman theme. The music is stirring, as the saying goes. There are two particular tracks that I enjoy, The Planet Krypton, which is awesome, and the Love Theme. Love the wind instrument sounds. Raiders of the Lost Ark is excellent. The music really does convey the sense of adventure. Imperial March is also fantastic. Is John Williams musical works comparable to the works of classical composers like Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, etc.? I have only a limited knowledge of classical music. Is William's music the same genre as those other composers? I have seen symphony companies perform John William's music from the movies. Does his music from the movies transcend pop culture and is it comparable to classical music from the great composers?
Beautiful instrumental music is beautiful instrumental music, so in that sense, yes. Is it the same genre? I mean, I don't think you can really truly fit all the classical composers into a single genre in the first place. But plenty of Williams' (and others - Ifukube, Zimmer, Elfman, Giacchino, etc) work very easily sits alongside various specific classical works, I'd say. They're certainly no less worthwhile than composers of prior eras just because they're paid by movie studios instead of rich patrons.
Depending on the composer and the specific film score, I would say a lot of film music does fit under the broad umbrella of Classical, but as GB noted, there's a lot of smaller umbrellas beneath that one.Mozart and Stravinsky, for instance, are both Classical composers, but their styles are -very- different. There is some film music that is stylistically similar enough to other kinds of classical music that it probably falls into those sub-genres, but I'm not immediately sure whether any of Williams' music is anything I would categorize that way.