Review: HANS ZIMMER: THE MOST UNLIKELY ROCK STAR at Nationwide Area

If you are looking for the prototypical stomp-around-the stage-in-tiger-striped-Spandex-pants rock star, Hans Zimmer is not your guy.

Performing before a mostly sold-out Nationwide Arena audience on Feb. 4, the Music Composer looks like he’d be more comfortable in a coffee shop than he would be in front of 20,000 fans.

Yet with its state-of-the-art laser light show, its 40-plus orchestra and choir, and large video screen images, the Music Composer’s tour stacks up there visually with the best of shows.

“You know I don’t do this professionally,” Zimmer said. “I usually sit in a dark room with no windows. Well, this is also a dark room with no windows, but it is a lot (larger) than the room I normally sit in.”

Columbus was among the last stops for Zimmer’s 2025 leg of his North American tour, with only shows in Brooklyn, N.Y. (Feb. 6) and Baltimore (Feb. 7) remaining. After he concludes this run of shows, he will be putting together an entirely new package for a future tour.

But for now, Zimmer, who needs only an Emmy win to become an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) winner, seems to be content. The show in Columbus was just two days after Zimmer grabbed his fifth Grammy Feb. 2 in Los Angeles, this one for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for his soundtrack to Dune: Part 2.

Despite Zimmer’s success, it took former Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr and producer Pharrell Williams to talk Zimmer into doing a North American tour after a seven-year absence.

Zimmer said he has tried not to think of the performances as concerts.

“The only way I know how to do this is to pretend we’re having a dinner party,” he said. “We’re friends and we’re having a chat.”

If this was an intimate dinner party, one wonders what a raucous party would be like at the House of Zimmer. The composer, who has worked on more than 500 projects across all mediums, took the audience through an exhausting three-hour odyssey of his work.

Sporting a blue suit jacket, the German-born composer spent most of the concert strutting around the stage with a guitar in hand or sitting behind keyboards. At one point, Zimmer left the comfortable confines of the stage and meandered through the crowd. He even photo bombed a concert goer’s selfie before returning to the stage.

But more often than naught, Zimmer easily let himself slide into the backdrop. Apart from the performance of Inception’s “Time,” which featured a continuous spinning top, the composer doesn’t show clips of the movies from whence the songs originated, letting the music speak for itself.

The concert focused on the mega hit movies, Dune Part I and The Lion King, for which Zimmer won Oscars, as well as Inception, Wonder Woman, Man of Steel, Gladiator, Inner Stellar, No Time to Die, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight, Dune Part 2,  and The Last Samurai, as well as one flop, Dark Phoenix.

“Sometimes, you try to do something really well and it turns out to be complete garbage,” Zimmer said as he brought singer/violinist Molly Rogers up for vocals. “I wrote a piece (for a film that) might not have hit the mark.

 “Even though the movie was terrible, we like to play the music from it. The beautiful thing about that is no one saw it, so in a way we still have a clean slate.”

There weren’t any clunkers in Zimmer’s set list. His team does an exquisite job of incorporating laser lights and color swaths on the large video screens to supplement the music without overpowering it.

Although Marr, who played selective shows during the North American tour when it started in the fall, was not there for the second five concert jaunt in 2025, Zimmer surrounded himself with talented musicians and singers.

In his show, Zimmer rarely did anything quietly. The show opened to Inception’s “Mombasa” with a battalion of bagpipers. Some songs featured five drummers or a half dozen violinists, creating some deep, dark textures of music to match the large screen projections.

Throughout the show, Zimmer allowed each one of the performers a chance to be in the spotlight he tried to avoid.

Guitarist Guthrie Govan worked his way through blistering solos, particularly on the three suites of songs from the film Wonder Woman. His work was complimented by bassist Juan “the Snow Owl" Garcia-Herrero and keyboardist Nick Glennie-Smith.

“We did some bookkeeping today,” Zimmer said. “This is our 204th show and for every one of those shows, (Govan) has never played the same thing. He has always invented a new solo. His imagination is limitless. No kidding … I think tonight was your best solo ever.”

Flautist Pedro Eustache added a distinct, deep-in-the-jungle sound to The Lion King. According to the program, Eustache grew up in Venezuela and had limited access to instruments. So he made his own.

“Sometimes I write things that are unplayable (on conventional instruments). There’s this shop called Home Depot and they have some wonderful PVC piping,” he joked as a picture on the screen showed the flautist fashioning a woodwind instrument out of tubing. “I’m pretty sure you didn’t know your home plumbing could sound like that.”

A string section consisting of electric cellist Tina Guo, cellist Marika Muranaka, upright bassist Andy Pask, and violinists Rusanda Panfili, Molly Rogers and Leah Zeger added a sultry, fiery presence to the proceedings while percussionists Aicha Djidjelli, Steven Doar, Holly Madge, and Aleksandra Suklar provided the thunder.

“I’m just going to stop introducing you,” Zimmer joked with Guo, who got an ostentatious round of applause when she was announced to the crowd. “The whole world seems to know her and the whole world seems to love her.”

Often members of the orchestra exchanged instruments and a few were pulled up to augment a group of talented vocalists consisting of Loire Cotler, Lisa Gerrard, and Lebo Morake and a backing choir.

One of the highlights of the show was watching Lebo M. share vocals with his daughter Refi on THE LION KING suite.

Another highwater mark artistically was the song “Paul’s Nightmare” from Dune. Veiled vocalists were hidden among the crowd and sprang into song when the spotlight landed on them.

Perhaps the biggest reveal of the evening was how introverts land mega deals in Hollywood. They find other introverts.

Zimmer recalled how his role in the movie Inner Stellar came about. He had drifted to a corner of a room at a party when he had a chance meeting with director Chris Nolan.

“I hate going to parties; I am really bad at it. I like to melt away into a corner and hide,” he said. “Chris is equally terrible at parties.

“We started to talk about movies. I remember him saying, ‘if I were to write you a letter and in it would be a fable, would you spend some time writing whatever (music) comes to mind?’

Days later, Zimmer received a  letter from Nolan and he wrote a “ tiny little fragment of a piece” and played it for the director.

“I got to the end of it and asked, ‘So, what do you think of it?’” Zimmer said with a laugh. “He goes, ‘Well I guess I have to make the movie now.’”

Let’s hope Zimmer continues to seek the shadows and stay in dark rooms with no windows as long as he continues to wander away from them with beautiful music.

Photo credit: Suzanne Teresa

 

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