In a 2017 interview, I asked Hans Zimmer—Academy Award-winning composer of the scores for Dune, The Lion King, Gladiator and many others—if it bothered him when other composers bit his style, using his Inception score as an example. Did it bother him that Inception’s “brummmm” sound was now in every other movie trailer?
“No, I don’t mind it,” he said, chuckling. “Listen. Knock yourself out. Having people snap at my heels forces me into inventing music. Sometimes I do well with it, sometimes I don’t, but I always give it a try.”
On September 29 at Resorts World Theatre, over the course of a spectacular, 100-minute live show, Zimmer did well with it, displaying the full range of his creative invention. Backed with a massive band, plus an orchestra of players from the Ukraine and a seemingly bottomless cast of guest performers that included iconic Dead Can Dance singer Lisa Gerrard, the composer performed suites of music from the aforenamed films plus Wonder Woman, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dunkirk and more, spread across some 3 hours with a 20-minute intermission. He could have gone longer still.
Yet that doesn’t quite describe Zimmer’s live show, which is less a concert of film music and more an emotional, heart-pounding sensorium. There are moments in this show, a lot of moments, that tingle on your spine and/or bring tears to your eyes, from Pedro Eustache’s soulful duduk in Dune’s “A Time of Quiet Between the Storms” to Lebo M’s gorgeous Swahili vocal at the opening of The Lion King (“Nants ingonyama bagithi baba,” which, I’ve just learned, translates to “Here comes a lion”). The vibe moves rapidly from ambient chill to head-banging aggression, and the transitions feel like they change the temperature in the room.
Every suite yields a new gift: Loire Cutler’s war-cry vocal from Dune, the chest-pounding “chorus” of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme, the chiming guitars of Inception (originally played by Johnny Marr, but performed on tour by his son Nile). In cinemas, those sounds could be confused with transmissions from space, but on stage, Zimmer takes pains to tie every one of them to a virtuoso player. He goes out of his way to praise his onstage collaborators—he said flat-out that the fierce riff of Wonder Woman wouldn’t exist if not for cellist and “tigress” Tina Guo—and if that’s not enough to make them feel appreciated in the moment, he hugs every one of them at the end of the set.
A quick note on the sound: Resorts World Theatre’s dimensional sound system, furnished by French manufacturer L-Acoustics, is an absolute marvel. The L-ISA (L-Acoustics Immersive Sound Art) allows engineers to pinpoint sounds directly to the musician producing them. What that meant in the context of Zimmer’s show is that I could look at any one of the players—again, there was no small number of them on stage—and not only hear what they were playing but hear it with such clarity and immediacy that they might have been playing directly at me and no one else. I’ll need to return for Janet Jackson’s residency to make sure, but Resorts World may well have the best-sounding room of its size in Vegas, and L-Acoustics’ technology is an indelible part of that equation.
I’m reluctant to share too much more about Hans Zimmer’s live show, because in a minor miracle, it’ll be back here shortly: the US tour comes to T-Mobile Arena on October 12. If for no other reason, you should go to hear the beautiful ruckus all those great players can make—but also, you should go to see a great talent who, even after achieving what few other film composers have done, is striving to reinvent himself.
