Erin Harrington reviews CSO & Rova Present: The Music of Hans Zimmer, conducted by Benjamin Northey, at the Douglas Lilburn Auditorium, the Christchurch Town Hall, Friday 14 August 2026.
Hans Zimmer is perhaps the most distinctive, inventive and celebrated film composer of the last few decades. His work combines intellectual rigour, emotional depth and creative experimentation with widespread popular appeal. The Christchurch Symphony Orchestra’s performance of The Music of Hans Zimmer offered a rare opportunity to feel this work in all its orchestral and cinematic immediacy – a different type of experience from the rattling subs of an oversized Dolby configuration, and one that brings to the fore unexpected and often delightful details.
This concert is presented in conjunction with Art of the Score, a terrific in-depth podcast about film music and orchestration, that also collaborates with civic orchestras to stage immersive experiences devoted to specific films or composers. Podcast host Andrew Pogson, in what looks from the gallery like a razzle dazzle purple velvet jacket, comperes the evening with charisma and enthusiasm. He introduces pieces, talks us through some of their distinctive features, pelts us with choice trivia, and engages in a fair amount of stagey banter with the CSO’s Chief Conductor Benjamin Northey. It’s kinda dorky and thoroughly charming, like one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts but with dad jokes and Letterboxd integration.
This creates scope for some serious added value beyond the evening’s already stacked programme, which covers Zimmer’s work from the late 1980s to the 2010s. The benefit of having an orchestra to hand is that if you want to illustrate, say, the development of Batman themes from Neil Hefti’s jangly surf rock spy hook in the 60s (complete with audience singalong), to Danny Elfman’s gothic movie theme from 1989, to Zimmer’s scoring for director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight films, then all you need to do is wave a baton and the trombones will swing their slides with glee. These playful asides between pieces also offer new ways of listening, as in the demonstration of how the infamous, thunderous braaamm from Zimmer’s score for Nolan’s Inception is a time dilated version of Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien”, a song that follows the film’s characters through various layers of dreams.
Some of the programme illustrates Zimmer’s ability to paint pictures with music, combining genre-specific storytelling tropes and motifs with approaches from various cultural musical traditions. The lyrical and optimistic melodic lines from The Lion King Suite, which draw from collaborations with South African composer Lebo M, and the jaunty melodies from Driving Miss Daisy and the rom com The Holiday, each illustrate the warmth and depth of the orchestra, in particular the dexterity of the upper strings. A rendition of “Oogway Ascends” from Kung Fu Panda, featuring principal cellist James Bush invoking the sound of an erhu, is similarly lovely. Congratulations too to flautist Terence Yang, who whips out an impeccable solo on his CSO debut.
Pretty is great, lush is nice too, but I find myself particularly drawn to the rough textures of the CSO’s formidable brass and percussion sections, as well as the pulsating ostinato of strings and woodwind, in those many works of Zimmer’s that are interested in time, pattern and momentum. It’s like sitting inside a subwoofer (complementary). Regular collaborator Christopher Nolan famously described Zimmer as “a minimalist composer with a maximalist production sense” – someone who explores simplicity through extremes of scale, and through force and repetition, while discovering new sounds and tonalities through the interplay between synthesised, produced and acoustic instrumentation. There’s a real sense of power in the orchestra’s interpretation of what’s already very physical music, particularly works from Inception and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (featuring bonus hornpipe action). The eerie “Journey to the Line” from Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line is deeply affecting. It’s just a pity that the actual Rieger pipe organ wasn’t used during the otherwise spectacular Interstellar symphonic suite – it was right there, guys! – but the synthesiser does a very good job.
The programme is considerable – both a touch overstuffed, at nearly two and a half hours long, but leaving the audience wanting more. I would have loved to have heard something from Dunkirk, particularly Zimmer’s use of the Shepard tone, an auditory illusion that creates a rising sense of anxiety, although similar strains come through in other material. His more recent work for film, in which he’s inventing new types of sound and production techniques, offer a lot of scope too.
Perhaps this is just greedy. After much bombast, the second half of the concert ends with “Now We Are Free”, from Gladiator, which soprano Zara Bellara performs with delicacy and dignity. The work ends quietly, with a sense of peace. It’s a thoughtful and very touching way to end the concert, and to bring the players and the audiences back into the present moment, and back to a human scale.
The concert is sold out and buzzy, and it’s clear from the extended standing ovation that the audience are thrilled. It’s an era where legacy arts organisations are having to adapt to new audience preferences and behaviours or get left behind. In recent years the CSO has really found the sweet spot between presenting high-quality traditional repertoire that showcases the orchestra’s specific talents, introducing new music, and programming with broad appeal, in a manner that’s also welcoming and ‘come as you are’. My companion and I have a great time people-watching beforehand: people in full gowns and furs eating donuts, little girls in sparkly dresses and fascinators, a 4-year-old boy in a very dapper suit, some guy wearing a Slipknot-branded tracksuit tucked into gumboots with a short-sleeved shirt and too-short necktie drinking an RTD. Everyone loves Zimmer! If you want to know what can drag people out of the house in winter in the middle of a cost of living crisis, it’s this. A brilliant night all round. Now say it again, at one tenth speed, and louder.
The Music of Hans Zimmer was performed Friday 14 August 2026.
Flat City Field Notes 