Hans Zimmer Live
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
Hans Zimmer’s music has soundtracked barbarian invasions, intergalactic derring-do and pratfalling pirates, but Hollywood’s favourite composer hadn’t reckoned with Dublin’s apocalyptic gridlock as he made his way to 3Arena for the seismic opening evening of a two-night residency.
“I apologise for us starting late, but you have a traffic problem out there that you have to sort out,” he says when he takes to the stage 15 minutes behind schedule.
Don’t worry, Hans. That metro will be along any century now.
Zimmer’s music is an astonishing starburst of influences. He has written some of the most moving scores in cinema history: his composition Time, from Christopher Nolan’s Inception, is a hypnotic, sob-inducing spiral towards the unknown. But he can do crowd-pleasing cheese, too, as underlined by Circle of Life, his early-1990s Elton John collaboration from The Lion King.
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Both pieces are performed during an absorbing two and a half hour set that puts the jovial and chatty German at the centre of a vast array of guitarists, drummers, string players and backing vocalists. At one point more than 30 people are on stage – not counting the diamanté-wrapped trapeze artist who soars above the sold-out audience during a selection of themes from Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar.
Zimmer explains that he wrote the lush theme to Beyond Rangoon for the director John Boorman when holed up in Ireland. And he introduces the guitarist and banjo player Nile Marr, who greets the crowd in fluent Irish and is later revealed to be the son of the Manchester-Irish Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr.
The performance has something for everyone, starting with a selection of ominous cuts from the grimdark superhero movie The Dark Knight, then moving on to the unsettling female chanting that is at the nucleus of his Dune soundtrack.
After the interval he and his huge ensemble – arranged across three split walkways – unpack the propulsive refrain from the recent F1 movie, starring Brad Pitt and Kerry Condon. Then he segues into work influenced by Africa, including excerpts from The Lion King. That’s followed by a closing performance of Time, with Zimmer alone at a piano.
The centrepiece arrives just before the break, as a re-creation of the best bits from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator culminates with Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance restaging her contributions to the score. It’s a haunting highlight of a mesmerising evening that not even the worst of Dublin’s traffic could ruin.
