This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on 2022 scores - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=122926
- If you want the full set of links, click on my profile.

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As the sun set on Lisbon and I slowly made my way through the line outside Altice Arena, one of several friends who’d joined me and my wife on our Portugal trip in summer 2023 - all of us sweating profusely throughout due to the heat as well as a robust collective appetite for port wine - mentioned that she’d probably doze off at some point during the upcoming performance, something she tended to do that during classical concerts and whatnot. “Uh…I don’t think it’s going to be that kind of concert.”

Indeed, that Hans Zimmer Live concert, the first I’ve had the pleasure of attending, was far removed from the typical live performance of scores; to quote Andrew Kawzcynski, a former assistant for both Hans and Lorne Balfe who finally got to attend one of these as an audience member instead of a performer, “It’s a rock show.” If the 2000 Ghent concert was the blueprint of a car, and the initial 2016 version of Hans Zimmer Live was the Model T, then the 2023 iteration showed that Hans and his creative team had transformed this enterprise into a finely-tuned supercar - something you just have to have if you can afford it (and maybe even if you can’t). And all this from a man who not only had treated his Ghent as a one-off but also once said “I knew it wasn’t my life” when reflecting on his days playing in bands in England in the 1970s.

The program had been adjusted since the original European tour; the two new Dune pieces were obvious selections a year after Hans’ Oscar win, though for my money the booming Wonder Woman 1984 suite was the most essential addition relative to 2016. That night also saw guitarist Guthrie Govan lay down an outrageous solo in the middle of the Man of Steel suite, flabbergasting Hans to the point that he dropped his jaw and had to pull over a chair halfway through the lengthy shredding. And Hans kicked off the second half of the show by playing his friend Harold Faltermeyer’s Top Gun theme, amusing (at least for me) given that nearly all of the music the two of them wrote for Top Gun: Maverick before the pandemic hit didn’t end up in the movie. Yet old favorites like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Gladiator, and The Lion King still proved potent, and part of the fun of the night was how those scores provided opportunities for old friends like Lisa Gerrard and Lebo M, essential parts of some of Hans’ biggest successes decades earlier, to pop on stage and shine.

Hans made for an entertaining master of ceremonies, though his gregarious demeanor as he interacted with several female contributors throughout the night did cause our concert-going group to speculate whether he was hooking up with one of them, speculation furthered by how little electric cellist Tina Guo was wearing. But we all felt silly a month later when Hans proposed to his girlfriend Dina De Luca on stage in front of 20,000 spectators in London. Thankfully she said yes! And Hans moving one step closer to his third marriage wasn’t the only lucrative part of the tour, for in May alone it pulled in over $10M in gross revenue. That isn’t the same league as, say, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, but it affirmed the singularity of Hans that he was the only film composer placing in Bloomberg’s top 25 rankings of pop stars that summer.

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“Somebody two or three times a year messages to remind me I’m the Chuck Norris of film music. I like the fact that they waste their energy sending it all the time. But Chuck Norris is pretty good!”

Another year for Lorne Balfe, another big batch of projects - eight in 2023, along with serving as music director of The Game Awards (the video game equivalent of the Oscars) and writing a theme for the Chinese film Ping Pong: The Triumph, a big piece of Media Ventures cheese ultimately sliced by Andrew Kawczynski and several of Lorne’s assistants. There was also producing former assistant Steffen Thum’s score for the anachronistic Swedish historical film Stockholm Bloodbath that had its premiere event in late 2023 and was set for release in early 2024 (nearly a decade after Hans had produced early solo scores of Lorne’s like Terminator Genisys), and there might’ve been even more work if the year’s writer and actor strikes hadn’t slammed Hollywood to a halt for months; Lorne told film music reporter Jon Burlingame in August that he had nothing on his plate. But the release schedule masked how protracted some compositional processes were, with the composer working on and off on at least two of these for 18-24 months.

Streaming took up a good chunk of his output. There were new themes and genre influences for Amazon’s second season of The Wheel of Time (Lorne mentioned dreampop and dark wave), the refinement of the folk rock fantasy stew he’d cooked up in 2021 resulting in two more entertaining - if still divisive - albums. Netflix’s grim film continuation of Luther, a TV detective series starring Idris Elba, got appropriately grim suspense music that made for a chore of an album. Two films produced by Kingsman director Matthew Vaughn for Apple TV+ got variable results; the spy romcom Ghosted received by-the-numbers action music, but the immensely enjoyable telling of how Tetris was extracted from the Soviet Union in the 1980s was treated to delightfully retro synth material, the composer (an childhood fan of electronic groups like Depeche Mode) having a blast trying to authentically evoke the era, even to the point of incorporating sounds from the game.

Months before shooting began in 2022 on the dramatization of how someone became a race car driver based on their skills playing the Gran Turismo video game, Stephen Barton was tasked with scoring the film, but by April 2023 it was announced that he was no longer involved. Lorne, the modern king of replacement scores, had worked with director Neill Blomkamp before, and he brought Andrew Kawczynski - getting his first lead credit on a major film - on board in February, with Andrew and some of Lorne’s team working “nonstop” until June composing and experimenting with sounds to be consistent with the games’ atmosphere and the movie’s various hip-hop and rock songs - and also to adhere to Blomkamp’s desire to “keep the pace up.” Expect engagingly energetic if not terribly distinctive music.

Hans’ onetime assistant Justin Burnett had scored a misbegotten adaptation attempt of the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons in 2000, killing the franchise on screen until the Chris Pine-starring Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves came out in 2023. Lorne, a fan in his youth of the game, unleashed a hefty amount of music for the new movie, not just an album of themes and another 90-minute album of actual score but also an album of bard-style songs, several not even used in the film. The score ended up a frequently entertaining but all-over-the-place work, juggling many above-average tunes without really committing to any one as the main theme and veering between styles like Celtic music, robust orchestral moments, and contemporary thrills. But perhaps expecting more consistency or coherence from a film juggling action, comedy, and fantasy elements (and even superhero ones, in Lorne’s view) is to miss the point of its music.

To some, Honor Among Thieves was emblematic of the pitfalls of delegating to a team of composing assistants - nine in that case. Yet to immediately dismiss that approach would be to overlook how another 2023 score with ten additional writers ended up as Lorne’s finest achievement to date: Life on Our Planet, Netflix’s attempt to have an informational show populated with a menagerie of ancient computer-generated beasts that could compete with Apple TV’s Prehistoric Planet. Its music didn’t follow one norm of the genre though; notable television nature documentaries of recent decades had often included big title themes, but rarely did those themes make it into the rest of the show, with episodic music often instead playing to the moods and happenings of individual scenes. That’s not to say this approach is wrong in any way; note my praise for Frozen Planet II and Prehistoric Planet. But showrunner Dan Tapster was trying to show how hierarchies changed over millions of years, “a series-wide narrative with moments that keep recurring, and to have that reflected in the music was something I hadn’t had to do on other projects.”

Lorne created a rewarding alternative: a dense roster of themes, nearly all of which undergo significant variation throughout the eight-episode series, though the composer admitted the creative process was “difficult. With a film you often don’t want to overcomplicate things, [but] with this you do need many [themes], and they have to be as good as the prior one.” Twelve suites were written (for mammals, dinosaurs, sea creatures, the concepts of extinction and survival, and so on) that by my count contain 25 ideas if you break down those suites into their component verse and chorus parts plus “hooks” Lorne could occasionally drop in without always playing the whole melody after seeing similar success with that tactic in the prior year’s Top Gun: Maverick.

Chugging strings, world music atmospheres, BWAMs, and sound design certainly place this score in the Remote Control heritage. But there are just as many moments that harken back to older, more orchestral scoring, including themes for birds with progressions that evoke James Horner and several brass tunes that suggest Lorne may have been inspired by the grandeur that composer John Barry gave to wide-open spaces. This being the age of music streaming, over five hours of music ended up on nine albums, making the score an imposing beast to hear in full. But the highlights - sweeping, mysterious, soothing, exciting, playful, and more - made for some of the year’s most entertaining scoring, and there’s easily enough material for a mighty 2-hour playlist. In a strong year for nature series scoring (more Prehistoric Planet, George Fenton’s Wild Isles, Steven Price’s Blue Whales: Return of the Giants), Life on Our Planet reigned supreme.

Any discussion of Lorne’s output in 2023 would be incomplete without hitting on the follow-up to 2018’s Mission: Impossible - Fallout. That score, with its clear debt to Remote Control scores, had been divisive when it came out, but it had since undergone a positive reappraisal among many score fans and critics, and there was little surprise when Lorne was announced as the composer for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One and its sequel in May 2020. Lorne spent over three years on it, commencing writing before the COVID pandemic hit based on lines of dialogue or scene descriptions director Chris McQuarrie (or McQ, as Lorne often calls him) sent over and continuing to write - and rewrite - during shooting and well into postproduction. “You’re dealing with perfectionists. Sometimes in a movie ‘that’ll do’ happens, but [with] this team you come out of a screening and go, ‘The first 10 minutes doesn’t work, we have time, let’s give it another go.’” Lorne estimated he and his team wrote 15 hours of material, with four hours being recorded and around two ending up in the picture.

Attempts to evoke regions, including a Middle Eastern sound for an early desert sequence, were tossed because “they “pulled from the storytelling.” Electronics for the artificial intelligence villain didn’t gel with the picture, Lorne instead using “atonal woodwind clusters” as a nod to Jerry Goldsmith’s Poltergeist score, a seemingly odd inspiration until you realize both films deal with a group being menaced by an unseen adversary. Save for the bongo army, material akin to Fallout was eschewed, not only because the film’s old-school tone and surprising amount of humor seemed to demand a more organic sound but also because McQ had become enamored with the classical music of Jean Sibelius. And the appearance of the Swiss Top Secret Drum Corp at the 2022 Platinum Jubilee Celebration for England’s Queen Elizabeth prompted Cruise and McQ to request Lorne add them to the mix, likely after a decent amount of the score had already been conceived.

You’ll probably find Dead Reckoning a more successful score than Fallout if you gravitate towards the meaty orchestral sound that it regularly uses. The music’s relentless energy is also an undeniable asset in the film. And yet there is some thrill lost in the score jettisoning the more derivative and contemporary aspects of its predecessor; Dead Reckoning may have more sophisticated music than Fallout in several ways, but the later score doesn’t have any musical sequence quite as sensational as the earlier score’s Stairs and Rooftops. Regardless, most listeners will agree that even if Dead Reckoning as a film couldn’t hold its own against the summer 2023 box office juggernaut that was Barbenheimer (to the point that the Part One was excised from its title when it hit Paramount’s streaming service), Lorne’s music stood out as one of the year’s finest action scores.

One could say Lorne and his team’s music instead, what with there being ten credited additional writers and arrangers on Dead Reckoning, plus another four arranging for the Top Secret Drum Corps, but perhaps these days it takes a village on such projects, at least if you want to work on more than one gig a year. As Lorne later said about Life on Our Planet, “It took about a month [to write] each episode. We were recording over a period of 4-5 months. You [as the lead] have got to come with a clear vision, the themes, the DNA. [But] you’ve got to surround yourself [with] other creatives who will twist it or bring something different to it. If you don’t, it’s not a particularly great working environment.”

Life on Our Planet - ****½ - Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Brandon Campbell, Bernard Duc, Michael Frankenberger, Nikhil Koparkar, Taran Mitchell, Jon Ong, Alfie Godfrey, Kiley Norton, Rufio Sandilands & Joseph Stevenson; orchestrated by Adam Price, Bernard Duc & Jack McKenzie

More thoughts on that score here - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=128693

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One - **** - Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Joshua Pacey, Bobby Tahouri, Stuart M. Thomas, Adam Price, Peter G. Adams, Dieter Hartmann, Kevin Riepl, Max Aruj & Kevin Blumenfeld; add’l score arrangements by Ethan Gillespie; add’l Top Secret Drum Corps arrangements by Nicolas Gehrig, Simon Bringolf, Tim Stauffer & Nicolas Wesp; orchestrated by Adam Price, Gabriel Churnick, Nicolò Braghiroli, Ben Frost, Aaron King & Harry Brokensha, conducted by James Brett, Gavin Greenaway, Ernst Van Tiel, Gottfried Rabl & Zoltán Pad; technical assistants Ethan Gillespie & Samuel Grade

The Wheel of Time Season 2 - **** - Lorne Balfe; add’l music / arrangements by Michael Bitton, Alfie Godfrey, Jon Ong, Rufio Sandilands, Nikhil Koparkar & Taran Mitchell

Tetris - ***½ - Lorne Balfe; add’l programming & mixing by Adam Price, Kevin Blumenfeld & Joshua Pacey; technical assistant Ethan Gillespie

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves - ***½ - Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Adam Price, Brandon Campbell, Stuart M. Thomas, Peter G. Adams, Steven Davis & Joshua Pacey; add’l arrangements by Kevin Riepl & Gabriel Churnick; add’l programming by Rufio Sandilands; orchestrated by Adam Price, Harry Brokensha, James Yan, Aaron King & Jack MacKenzie; score conducted by Peter Rotter; choir conducted by Jasper Randall; song co-writers John Dailey, Jonathan Goldstein, Liam Og O’Hannaigh, Naoise Iarla O’Caireallain & James John O’Dochartaigh; technical assistants Ethan Gillespie, Taran Mitchell & Michael Bitton

Gran Turismo - *** - Lorne Balfe & Andrew Kawczynski; add’l arrangements by Michael Bitton, Michael Frankenberger, Taran Mitchell, Rufio Sandilands, Alfie Godfrey & Kiley Norton; add’l sonic sound & music design by Austin Wintory, Jason Graves, Joris De Man, Lena Raine, Helen Lynch & The Flight; orchestrated by Bernard Duc; conducted by Gottfried Rabl

Ghosted - *** - Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Stuart M. Thomas, Peter G. Adams, Kevin Riepl, Steve Davis & Adam Price, add’l arrangements by Ethan Gillespie; synth programming by Hex Cougar; orchestrated by Adam Price, Samuel Read & Aaron King; conducted by Péter Illényi & Gintaras Rinkevicius

Ping Pong: The Triumph - **½ - Andrew Kawczynski; theme by Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Michael Frankenberger, Ole Wiedekamm & Forest Christenson; music production Rufio Sandilands; orchestrated by Adam Price, Ben Frost, Samuel Read & Jack McKenzie; conducted by Péter Illényi

Luther: The Fallen Sun - *½ - Lorne Balfe; add’l music by Peter G. Adams, Steve Davis, Stuart M. Thomas & Ethan Gillespie; programmers Jon Aschalew & Andy Clemson; orchestrated by Adam Price, Harry Brokensha & Ben Frost; conducted by James Brett; technical assistant Ethan Gillespie

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Next time:
- “After having controlled myself, I didn’t for this one. I just let it rip.”
- “Wacko guitars.”