Review: Film composer Hans Zimmer rocked out to some of his famed scores at Target Center

Before he became the most successful film composer of his generation, Hans Zimmer was a rocker.

Back in the 1970s, he played keyboards for such bands as the Buggles, Krisma and Krakatoa before turning his attention to movie music, proving skilled enough that four winners of the best picture Oscar had Zimmer scores.

And perhaps you can take the rocker out of the arena, but you can’t take the arena rocker out of Zimmer. Maybe that’s why he’s leading an enormous entourage — a rock band, orchestra and choir — around North America right now, performing live versions of suites from his film scores. “Hans Zimmer Live” filled Minneapolis’ Target Center almost to capacity on Saturday night, and it was clear that the composer has learned something from Hollywood about knocking your eye out with spectacle and amping up your adrenaline.

With at least 40 musicians on a tiered stage lined with lights, Zimmer and company presented music from 16 films over the course of a three-hour-and-10-minute show that likely gave those in the Target Center crowd exactly the sonic surges they sought.

And such surges do seem a Zimmer specialty. The themes around which he builds his film scores are essentially quite simple in structure, usually placing a handful of chords in a certain order, then gradually adding more and more instruments atop them. While some of his music is quite pretty, much more of it is percussive to a volcanic degree, and there was a whole lot of booming on Saturday.

Interwoven within the two sets and two-piece encore was the music from his Oscar-winning score for 2021′s “Dune,” complete with mysterious hooded figures singing from various points within the arena and basses creating such a rumbling that audience members couldn’t be blamed for expecting sandworms to erupt from the floor at any moment.

But most of the concert was given over to extended suites from blockbuster films, such as “Wonder Woman 1984,” which unleashed seven women upon two conjoined drum kits, a set of timpanis and two bass drums, and “Man of Steel,” which may have included some overly dramatic bowing from the hot-pants-clad women violinists and cellists at the lip of the stage, but concluded with one of several impressive wailing electric guitar solos that Guthrie Govan unspooled over the course of the concert.

While music from one of those best picture winners, “Gladiator,” became a tad too relentlessly repetitious in a violent center section that went on too long, it concluded with some of the night’s most beautiful music, the voice of singer Lisa Gerrard wafting over the audience from a perch at the peak of the stage.

Zimmer came off as a generous host all evening, whether singling out musicians for particular praise or smilingly striding up the main floor’s center aisle while thumping a bass guitar on music from “The Dark Knight.” While subtlety and sadness were in short supply in most of the music, a melancholy melody on violin and cello from “The Last Samurai” cut into the deficit.

The evening reached its peak in the second-set finale, a bouncy suite from “The Lion King” that featured lead vocals from Zimmer’s main collaborator on that film’s music, Lebo M. After an encore that featured a Latin-flavored jam on the “James Bond” theme, Zimmer concluded the evening alone at the piano, repeatedly plunking out four simple chords from “Inception” that mesmerized the audience and brought a thunderous show to a hear-a-pin-drop conclusion.

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music writer. Reach him at wordhub@yahoo.com.