CONCERT: John Williams vs Hans Zimmer - The Concert (Antwerp, October 2018)

[bollemanneke 3,337]

Okay, I’m back. I was going to start with an apology because this review wasn’t meant to be as detailed as my other ones: I finally found a translation agency that wants me to work for them (yay!) and this concert doesn’t deserve a proper review anyway, but I’m in a rather foul temper because of it that writing a detailed analysis wasn’t hard at all, so you’re not getting the apology.

 

The concert took place at the Stadsschouwburg in Antwerp. It had apparently already sold out in Brussels and/or Liège and/or Ghent and here the hall was packed full as well (so not packed full in LSO speak). The seats were quite small and the conductor was a Brit called Anthony Inglis who mostly did a very good job keeping the audience entertained, but more about him later. The orchestra was the Kharkov Philharmonic. I had never heard of them before and after tonight I certainly don’t want to find out more about them either. They sounded like a youth orchestra that had forgotten to rehearse. Okay, no, drop the youth part, they weren’t that bad, they were just bad. There were tuning issues throughout the entire concert. It wasn’t even a qeustion of one oboe or viola, it was everyone all the time. ‘So what will we do during the break? Dunno, but we’re NOT re-tuning! We started badly, so we’ll end badly, goddammit! We’ll just pretend to re-tune.’ They clearly couldn’t handle some of the material either, mostly Williams’ incredibly difficult music. So before I dive into the actual content, you can assume that every piece they played had performance flaws and tuning problems. The sound itself came from one speaker only and it was one of these speakers that amplified every instrument separately, so there certainly was no shortage of detail when it came to picking out individual instruments. Unfortunately, it also meant that their numerous mistakes were even more obvious than they would have been if they hadn’t been amplified and whenever they were playing quietly, you could hear a distinct hiss. Especially in the first half, the percussion and bassoons were ridiculously and obnoxiously loud too, as were the violinists, who couldn’t seem to play without vibrato, which didn’t always work well (somehow it did in the Raiders March). Speaking of percussion, how do you manage to miss half of your timpani beats in one concert? Finally, the mix itself suffered from a very serious problem: the accompaniment often sounded so… empty and hollow. Think City of Prague Philharmonic playing percussive action cues: clear melodies and thumping percussion, but nothing between that.

 

The evening opened with a mini speech by Darth Vader and ET, a very entertaining start to the evening and sadly one of the few things I truly enjoyed.

 

So what did these musicians actually play? Well, they opened with the Jaws main theme. That wasn’t really my first choice, especially because I had brought someone who mostly firmly listens to renaissance and baroque music, but okay, they played it nicely. Then came Adventures on Earth. I was expecting the flying theme, but again, okay. During the quiet passage, some woman started coughing terribly, but at least the fact that the whole hall soon joined in caused some mirth.

 

Da Vinci Code came next. Tell me, how does one arrange Chevaliers de Sangreal for orchestra and then lose most of Zimmer’s excellent, original violin notes at the end? And where’s the original sheet music? This is your doing, isn’t it, Nic Raine? Now that we’re on the subject of Zimmer, the first half contained more Zimmer music and the second half more Williams.

 

Hedwig’s theme. Very nice celesta performance there, but those violinists… Can I backtrack and call them youth orchestra members after all? When they had finished with that piece, the conductor told us about how the London Symphony Orchestra had had to rehearse that rapid violin part at the beginning over and over again because even they found it very difficult, and then he praised this orchestra for coping so well. Now, that would only have worked if the orchestra HAD coped well. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that they botched it or the fact that the audience was ecstatic afterwards.

 

Now all I still needed to hear was Time from Inception. And not just Time, oh no, an elongated version of Time! Oh joy. By that time I was losing patience rapidly.

 

What else? Oh yeah, Batman. After introducing the movies, Inglis told us that Zimmer had scored all three of them and he seemed to love that fact. Did he now? Then they started their Batman suite with unmistakable and fantastic James Newton Howard material: Father to the Rescue is amazing. More beats were missed in subsequent themes and at such moments I was inevitably thinking of JNH’s superior concert, but the suite itself was decent and summarised some of the major themes, excluding the Joker, Catwoman and Harvey Dent… and Batman’s theme that ends in B-flat major didn’t come up anywhere. WHY? We only got that depressing Dark Knight variation.

 

I’ll just go on with Zimmer’s music, I’m too tired to try and remember the right order.

 

Pirates of the Caribbean opened the second half. I thought Zimmer officially didn’t write the Black Pearl? Or is that Last Samurai contract legally void now? Anyway, they played a Curse of the Black Pearl suite, which was very nice, except for the fact that it ended with the intro to the B section of Jack Sparrow (4:03 in the album track), but not the actual theme. And At World’s End, which is my opinion a vastly superior score, wasn’t covered at all either.

 

Back to Williams for a moment. The Raiders March. Not a great time for trumpets and trombones to play wrong notes, but I suppose it could have been worse and Marion’s theme was very nice. Jurassic Park had too much violin vibrato yet again, more out-of-tune oboes, the bassoons got utterly confused after the first happy island fanfare and during that fanfare, the piano/celesta contented itself with 1% of that marvellous, rapid accompaniment.

 

But luckily, Schindler’s List’s main theme was waiting for us. Now, that was without a doubt the highlight of the evening. The conductor told us about his personal experience and impressions when watching SL for the first time himself, which was quite effective to set the right tone, and of course the ‘they’re all dead’ story had to come up, but this time in different words and he also added the ‘fact’ that Williams cried his eyes out while watching it for the first time with Spielberg. The soloist was terrific, but even here, the string section managed to make some mistakes during their quiet tremolo passages. Well done, soloist, though, and he got a huge round of applause too, which was twice as effective as you could hear a pin drop during the entire piece.

 

Now enough praise, let’s play the blame game again. I was never a huge fan of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind suite, but have been appreciate what Williams is trying to do in it more and more. The conductor introduced us to that piece by teaching us… wait for it… to sing the five notes, ‘because we’ve done enough work’. He also explained the meaning of the word leitmotif. That’s l-e-i-t-m-o-t-i-f, write it down. The only time I’ll ever repeatedly sing those five notes again will be when I want my future wife to run to another country. The audience was divided into two sections for this intermezzo: one group were the aliens and the others were the humans, all united in one common language: music (and in my case exasperation). I was hot and bored by now and hissed ‘just get on with it’. Granted, we did end up ‘re-creating’ that fast moment in The Dialogue, but my problem is this: If you keep turning John Williams performances into musical events for the dumb masses, orchestras are never going to take him seriously. Instead of asking us to lah-lah-lah-lah-lah, how about, I don’t know, rehearsing a little bit in advance? And need I still say that I felt utterly embarrassed for my companion? I’m trying to teach him that John Williams is musically as excellent as Bach, you’re not helping! I don’t know enough about the suite to comment on the performance, but at least this piece didn’t seem to be played too quickly and clumsily.

 

Two more things left to mention: Star Wars and the encores. At first, they concluded the second half with Across the Stars and the Imperial March. Across the Stars is so nice with an out-of-tune oboe. The Imperial March wasn’t bad at all, though, and unlike the Royal Albert Hall version, Darth Vader didn’t breathe all over the quieter passage. Speaking of other concerts in this series, they didn’t perform Hook either here, maybe just as well because it might have sounded like Tinker Bell falling down every two seconds.

 

Then the encores began and every time, the conductor made it sound as though the one they played would be the very last one, so imagine my despair when they began with Man of Steel. No, I still don’t like it, even if you arrange it for full orchestra and go on for 10 minutes, though it sounded a tiny little bit better because it was being played by (flawed) humans now. To add insult to injury, they used synthetic choir, the only choral moment in the entire evening. If you think Titanic’s choir sounds artificial, think again. This one sounded like a three-second sample of every note that was looped clumsily over and over again, you can compare it the loop speed of a CD getting stuck in a groove at the very end of an album. Anyway, Man of Steel was received with more ecstasy, so they graced us with another encore.. the Star Wars main theme. One man in particular was looking forward to that piece because the introductory announcement was met with a strangled, elated yell from the back. The performance was passable (not the violins playing the B section of the fanfare at the beginning and the flutes started their rebel march during Leia’s theme too early and the audience was enthralled, so, yes, you guessed it: we got another encore… the Superman March, but not before another five minutes of public ‘entertainment’ that required us to stand up and rip open our shirts like Superman. I couldn’t do that because I had already ripped mine open forty minutes ago when the limited space and warm temperature in the hall became too much. I was so tired of it all at that point that I didn’t even enjoy the final two pieces anymore or clapped more than five seconds, I just wanted it to end, to get out and have a drink (we couldn’t get any during the break).

 

Speaking of the break, it took place twenty minutes late and the second half ended too late as well. Now, I understand this isn’t a major concern for most people, but it’s really impractical if you have to arrange for someone to meet you at a particular time and place, so the two final Williams ‘performances’ were accompanied by repeated, anxious and cross ‘Where are you?’ iPhone messages.

 

All in all, everything could have been so much better. I had booked tickets for this concert to compensate for my absence in London in October. Boy, am I glad Classic FM will be broadcasting that one. At least we know it will be god. I want my money back!

 

If anyone has any questions or comments, I demand that you first record yourself ripping open your shirt and singing the five CE3K notes. If you don’t, don’t hold your breath for a response.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

Good to hear you got a new job, Bolleke.

[The Illustrious Jerry 3,356]

On the note of Pirates of the Carribbean, Zimmer was not the main composer on The Curse of the Black Pearl. That belonged to Klaus Badelt. Alan Silvestri was originally asked to score the movie, but departed on creative differences with Bruckheimer. Zimmer was asked to step in, but he was busy with The Last Samurai, so he couldn't do all the work. Zimmer is credited as a producer and reportedly had a big part to play in writing most of the themes, which he penned in the space of a night. So one could argue that the theme material and select cues are Zimmer's. Seven other composers acted as contributing writers: Geoff Zanelli, Nick Glennie Smith, James McKee Smith, Blake Neely, Steve Jablonsky, Ramin Djawadi, and James Dooley. Zimmer took full reigns of the franchise for Dead Man's Chest, At World's End, and On Stranger Tides using themes from the original which he and the others would have worked on as well as introducing new material. Geoff Zanelli scored the most recent film- Dead Man Tell No Tales. It's hard to say, but Zimmer did have a big part to plea in the franchise's scores. 

[Holko 9,499]

I remember reading the actual reason is not that he was "busy" with the Last Samurai, but that his contract on that movie explicitly forbade him from working on anything else (or maybe just films from other studios), so he couldn't recieve any formal credits on Pirates and it's unclear how much, if any, of the score he wrote himself outside of Pirates Day One. Even if he wrote 100% of every note outside of podium changes, which is unlikely, some placeholder composer still would have had to take the composer credit to avoid breaking that Samurai contract.

[The Illustrious Jerry 3,356]

It's hard to say. I can say for sure though that the next two Pirates scores, which he wrote, are really good! 

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

It has Zimmers' spunky DNA all over it like a goopy, salty sauce!

[Nick Parker 3,040]

11 hours ago, Stefancos said:

It has Zimmers' spunky DNA all over it like a goopy, salty sauce!

 

I never thought of Zimmer as being like balsamic vinaigrette, personally.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

Yeah...