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The profile · researched 29 October 2026
Seventy players, two catalogues and a scoreboard: inside the Zimmer–Williams head-to-head
A Raymond Gubbay touring concert that sets John Williams's themes against Hans Zimmer's soundscapes, running since 2018 and now booked from Leicester in November 2026 through to a Vancouver Symphony Orchestra residency in April 2027.
A rivalry invented for the concert platform
The show that tours as The Music of Zimmer vs Williams began life at the Royal Albert Hall on 9 June 2018 under the fuller title The Music of Hans Zimmer vs John Williams. It is a Raymond Gubbay production — now operating as RG Live, in partnership with Sony Music Entertainment International — and its premise is a scoreboard: the two composers alternate across the evening, with the audience invited to decide which approach to scoring a film actually wins.
The Albert Hall dates became the spine of the thing. A 2020 booking was pushed by the pandemic to 13 June 2021, another landed on 3 July 2022, and the production returned to the same room on 12 July 2026. In between it has spread outwards into the regional concert-hall circuit and, more recently, overseas, with Gubbay's Christmas season acting as the reliable annual slot.
The format has barely moved since the start, which is part of why it keeps getting rebooked. Two halves, an interval, a conductor who also presents, and a repertoire drawn from five decades of cinema: Star Wars, E.T., Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones and War Horse on one side; Gladiator, Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean and Dune on the other.
The two catalogues it draws on
John Williams, born in Queens on 8 February 1932, came up as a Hollywood studio pianist and orchestrator through the 1950s and 1960s, recording jazz albums as Johnny Williams and working alongside Henry Mancini and Bernard Herrmann before his own scoring career took hold. Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977 brought Academy Awards, as did E.T. and Schindler's List; he holds 54 Oscar nominations and five wins, the second-most nominated figure in the Academy's history. He was principal conductor of the Boston Pops from 1980 to 1993 and remains its laureate conductor.
Hans Zimmer, born in Frankfurt on 12 September 1957, arrived from the opposite direction: keyboards and synthesisers in the 1970s, a walk-on in the Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star video in 1979, then an apprenticeship in London with Stanley Myers, where the two set about welding orchestral writing to electronics. Rain Man in 1988 moved him to Hollywood. He has 12 Oscar nominations and two wins, for The Lion King and for Dune, and runs Remote Control Productions, the composer collective that has supplied much of the studio system's action scoring for twenty-five years.
That asymmetry is the show's engine. Williams's material is melodic and quotable, built on themes an audience can hum back; Zimmer's is textural and rhythmic, written for amplified rooms and low frequencies. Putting them on the same platform exposes both.
Who actually plays it
The orchestra is credited at 70 players. In London that means the London Concert Orchestra; RG Live also fields the Dublin Concert Orchestra and the Manchester Concert Orchestra, which is how the same programme turns up in two cities on the same afternoon during the Christmas run — Manchester and Nottingham both on 27 December 2026, Birmingham and Glasgow both on 30 December.
The constant is Anthony Inglis, born 27 June 1952, trained at the Royal College of Music. He worked on Ken Russell's Mahler and Lisztomania and in the West End before returning to the concert platform, conducted Gubbay's Classical Spectacular for fifteen years, is music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in London, and has appeared at the Royal Albert Hall more often than anyone else in the building's history. He conducts the Zimmer–Williams programme himself when it travels, including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra dates in 2027.
Buyers should note a second, separate production with a near-identical name. The Music of Hans Zimmer and John Williams – The Original London Production tours continental Europe with more than fifty players under Robert Emery, claims over 500,000 attendances across London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Geneva, Madrid and Barcelona, and ran at M.A.CH 36 in Déols, France on 6 March 2026. It is not the Gubbay show.
Where it stands in late 2026
On 16 October 2026 RG Live announced the Raymond Gubbay Christmas Season: 22 concerts across London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow from November 2026 to January 2027, with the Zimmer–Williams programme in the post-Christmas slot at the Bridgewater Hall on 27 December, Symphony Hall Birmingham and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 30 December, and the Barbican Hall on 31 December. The same season carries a separate Best of John Williams bill, alongside Christmas with Sir Karl Jenkins, the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Classical Spectacular.
Beyond the festive block, the tour runs from De Montfort Hall in Leicester on 1 November 2026 to the Cliffs Pavilion in Southend on 23 May 2027, taking in Usher Hall Edinburgh on 29 December, the New Theatre Oxford on 25 April 2027 and Swansea Arena on 8 May 2027. The two Vancouver Symphony Orchestra performances at the Orpheum on 2 and 3 April 2027, part of its pops series, are the clearest sign the production now licenses outwards rather than only touring its own band.
Both composers remain active, which keeps the repertoire moving. Zimmer scored F1 in 2025 and is attached to Zack Snyder's The Last Photograph in 2026. Williams said in June 2022 that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny would be his last film score, then reversed that in January 2023 with the line that he had ten more years in him; his Piano Concerto premiered at Tanglewood in July 2025, he was named in October 2025 to a 30th Spielberg feature, and a performing arts centre in his name opened at North Hollywood High School in April 2026.
The sound, and what the room gets
The July 2026 Albert Hall show was the production's most technically ambitious to date. The London Concert Orchestra was augmented to seven French horns, six trumpets, five trombones, two tubas and five percussionists, and the staging rose 2.4 metres from front to back in 40-centimetre risers — a geometry that defeats conventional stereo imaging in that building. Front-of-house engineer Phil Wright mixed it through a 64-channel TiMax SoundHub to localise each section where the audience could see it, and afterwards called it the best-sounding show he had mixed in the hall, citing the clarity of individual instruments and the accuracy of their placement.
Reviews have been warm rather than uncritical. A write-up of the Royal Festival Hall performance on 7 June 2022 gave four stars and praised Inglis's between-pieces commentary as relief from the heavier material, but complained that Zimmer was outnumbered: no Lion King, no The Holiday, and a Williams half dominated by Star Wars. It also recorded a show advertised at 135 minutes running closer to three hours.
A listener at the July 2026 Albert Hall date noted the programme reaching for less-obvious choices — the Sabrina love theme, The Adventures of Tintin, a Man of Steel suite — at the cost of the Raiders march and the clarinet theme from The Terminal, and described the Interstellar sequence as a house-wide audience effect with lasers and smoke saved for Star Wars. Elsewhere on the circuit the complaint is simpler: audiences expect the famous tunes, and the show is at its weakest when it withholds them.
The show, now
A current performance runs about two hours including an interval — the Barbican's 31 December 2025 matinee was billed at roughly that, and the Vancouver Symphony lists 120 minutes with one intermission — although a 2022 Royal Festival Hall date advertised at 135 minutes was reported closer to three hours. There is no support act: Anthony Inglis conducts and compères, feeding the audience film facts and jokes between numbers, and the running order alternates between the two composers rather than giving each a half. Around 70 players, with the brass and percussion heavily reinforced for the Zimmer material; the July 2026 Albert Hall show carried seven horns, six trumpets, five trombones, two tubas and five percussionists on risers climbing 2.4 metres to the back of the stage, mixed through a 64-channel TiMax spatial system that the front-of-house engineer rated the best he had mixed in that room. Staging is lighting-led rather than screen-led — lasers and smoke for Star Wars, a house-wide audience effect during Interstellar, fire and fireworks at the larger venues. Fan reaction splits predictably: strong on the playing and on Inglis's presentation, impatient when the programme favours less familiar cues such as the Sabrina love theme or The Adventures of Tintin over the Raiders march, and repeatedly noting that Zimmer gets the thinner end of the selection.
Researched from rg.live · prosoundweb.com · barbican.org.uk · vancouversymphony.ca · broadwayworld.com · stagetopage.co.uk · comfortablyadventurous.wordpress.com · feverup.com