Avond van De Filmmuziek

One evening at the Concertgebouw, March 2014

De Avond van de Filmmuziek was devised by Ewart van der Horst, a television producer best known in the Netherlands as the format-maker behind De Wereld Draait Door, Jinek and Beste Kijkers. It is produced by his company PilotStudio together with the N.U.N.C. foundation, and the first edition went up on 20 March 2014 at the Koninklijk Concertgebouw in Amsterdam — a single night, conceived as a tribute to a repertoire that Dutch concert halls had mostly treated as an add-on.

The template was set early: the Metropole Orkest as resident ensemble, a presenter from television rather than from the classical world, and a camera rig, because the show was built from the start as a broadcast as well as a concert. Ruben Nicolai hosted the first two years, Eric Corton took 2016, and Jan Versteegh 2017 and 2018. The conducting changed hands almost as often — Charles Floyd in 2014 and 2015, Vince Mendoza in 2016, Vincent de Kort in 2017 and 2018.

Five editions ran at the Concertgebouw before the production outgrew it.

The Ziggo Dome years, and Buckley

From 2019 the event moved to the Ziggo Dome, swapping roughly two thousand seats for a pop arena, and Jules Buckley took the podium — a tenure that has now run through every edition since. Peter Pannekoek presented the first arena night; the 2020 and 2021 editions were postponed under coronavirus restrictions; Dominic Seldis, the double bassist and Maestro presenter, took over hosting from 2022 to 2024, joined from 2025 by the actor Daan Schuurmans.

The scale-up is visible in the attendance. The 2023 edition on 17 November drew around 14,000 people to the Ziggo Dome, and the reviewer who covered it — a regular since the Concertgebouw years — wrote that the move to the arena had finally stopped feeling like a compromise. The tenth-edition run in November 2025 sold out.

The broadcast lineage has tracked the Dutch public-service reshuffles: VARA carried the 2014 edition, BNN from 2015 to 2017, and BNNVARA since 2018, with the television registration going out on NPO 1. The tenth edition's registration was shown on 3 February 2026.

What the programming actually does

The core repertoire is what an arena audience expects — John Williams and Hans Zimmer are the two composers the production leans on hardest — but the editorial habit that reviewers keep singling out is the deliberate padding-out with scores nobody programmes. The 2023 night put Dances with Wolves, A Single Man, La Grande Bellezza, The Batman and Avatar: The Way of Water alongside the standards, and opened not with Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra but with the Barbie version of it.

The 2025 edition pushed further in that direction: 26 works, fourteen before the interval and twelve after, including Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future music for the first time in the event's history, Williams's Hymn to the Fallen from Saving Private Ryan, and Zimmer's Solomon from 12 Years a Slave. Soundtrackwereld's verdict was that the balance had tipped decisively towards lesser-known film music and that the programme was outstandingly executed; its English-language sister review said the organisers had blown away expectations by building the night around fragments the event had never touched.

Guest casting is the other lever. Lebo M has sung The Lion King material, Steve Stevens played the Top Gun guitar parts, Anna Lapwood has handled the Interstellar organ, Lavinia Meijer the Intouchables harp writing, Noa Wildschut the Schindler's List violin solo, and Lakshmi the Lord of the Rings vocals. The choir has rotated too — the Groot Omroepkoor in 2023, the Nederlands Concertkoor in 2025 and again this year.

Two spin-offs

In December 2025 the producers ran a separate winter show at the Ziggo Dome, De Avond van de Filmmuziek: The Christmas Edition, on 20 and 21 December, again with the Metropole Orkest and with Schuurmans and Seldis hosting. The programme pulled from Wonka, Home Alone, Love Actually and The Holiday, with the winter sections of Harry Potter, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings filling out the rest.

The bigger expansion is Belgian. A separate franchise launched at the Antwerp Sportpaleis on 26 April 2025, with the Antwerp Philharmonic Orchestra under the Brazilian conductor Alexandra Arrieche rather than the Metropole Orkest. Its second edition played the same hall — renamed the AFAS Dome — on 9 May 2026, with Ibe, the soprano Ella Taylor, Stef Kamil Carlens, Tinne Oltmans and Klaasje Meijer among the soloists, a song from the Belgian film Manneken Pis, and a Belgian first for The Broken Circle Breakdown material. A third Antwerp edition is already on sale for 8 January 2028, again with Arrieche and the Antwerp Philharmonic.

Where it stands, November 2026

The 2026 Amsterdam edition is this month: Friday 20 and Saturday 21 November at 20:00, with a Sunday matinee on 22 November at 14:00, all at the Ziggo Dome. Buckley conducts the Metropole Orkest with the Nederlands Concertkoor, and Schuurmans and Seldis present again.

The announced soloists are Pedro Eustache, the flautist and multi-instrumentalist whose woodwind and duduk work runs through Dune, Avatar and The Lion King; the Canadian vocalist and sound creator Geneviève Côté; the mezzo-soprano Maria Fiselier, returning to sing Ennio Morricone; and the pianist Iris Hond, on her fifth appearance at the event. The programme takes in Dune, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, Morricone's Once Upon a Time in America theme, and a retrospective pass over a quarter-century of titles.

Demand has held up. As of the run-up to the shows, the Saturday is sold out, the Sunday matinee close to it, and only last tickets remain for the Friday; hospitality packages with seating and dining run from €195 to €345 a head. Seldis has made the case for the genre plainly in the production's own publicity: Williams, Zimmer and Morricone, he argues, now carry the same weight as Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler.

The experience in the room

Nothing about the staging pretends to be a recital. The Ziggo Dome show runs in two halves with an interval, somewhere past the two-hour mark, with a large screen behind the orchestra carrying film footage through most of the programme and the pre-filmed comedy that opens the night. In 2025 that opening was a Back to the Future parody, with Schuurmans and Seldis driving a DeLorean into the arena.

Non-musical guests get a short interview slot — the director Steve McQueen and the bodybuilder-actor Olivier Richters in 2025 — which keeps the night closer to a television gala than a concert. The audience-participation moment has become near-fixed: phone torches held up through the Interstellar organ writing. The 2025 run closed on Wicked, with Defying Gravity as the encore.