And now for a few soaring strains

WHEN Hollywood composer John Ottman, who wrote the scores for director Bryan Singer’s “The Usual Suspects” and “X2: X-Men United,” was approached about scoring Singer’s latest, “Superman Returns,” he admits he was a bit daunted.

“There was a great weight on my shoulders because of the strength of the original theme,” he says of the John Williams melody that accompanied director Richard Donner’s 1978 film “Superman.”

The trick, Ottman says, was to create music that was “new, but reverential to the past ... to not screw up the Superman world that Donner and Williams created.”

The reviews of the new film, which opened last week, are still coming in. But in almost no time -- we’re tempted to say “faster than a speeding bullet,” but we won’t -- the “Superman Returns” score will show up, in compressed form, at the Hollywood Bowl for three concerts beginning tonight that will highlight movie music.

“We tried, in haste, to put together a medley of motifs that I came up with for the new film, especially the more emotional material,” Ottman says. “It includes a theme I wrote that reflects Superman’s personal side -- his search for how he fits into the world after he’s maybe lost Lois Lane to another man. It’s more introspective and provides the emotional through line for the love story in the film.”

Ottman’s Bowl medley, to be played by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, will also feature themes for other characters, including supervillain Lex Luthor, “who never had one in the earlier films. I wrote a nasty, chromatic brass melody for him.”

And Ottman uses the original Williams theme -- that boon to high school marching bands everywhere -- in his Bowl selection, as the filmmakers do at several points in “Superman Returns.”

“I’d have been one of the rioters in the streets if they hadn’t used the original theme,” he says. “That theme is so simple, you can place it over everything and it works somehow.”

The challenge has been getting all these pieces, which were orchestrated for the Bowl by Damon Intrabartolo, into a coherent medley five or six minutes long.

“I hope,” the composer says, “it doesn’t sound like a train wreck.”

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Scott Timberg