Candlelight: The Best of Hans Zimmer

Candlelight: The Best of Hans Zimmer comes to The Little America Hotel on Sunday, October 18, 2026. It's a tribute to the work of Hans Zimmer, one of the most recognizable film composers working today, and the whole thing is performed by a string quartet.

If you've seen a Candlelight show before, you know the setup: the room is filled with hundreds of candles, and the music is stripped back to strings. Zimmer's scores are usually huge—full orchestras, heavy percussion, and deep synthesizers—so hearing them on a string quartet changes the feel. The melodies stand out more when the wall of sound is gone, and the arrangements bring the music down to a more intimate scale.

Zimmer's reach is hard to overstate. He's behind the music for The Lion King, Gladiator, Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Knight trilogy, and Pirates of the Caribbean, among many others. The program pulls from across that body of work, so you'll hear pieces from his early career alongside the more recent, atmospheric scores that have become his signature. It's a survey of his most well-known themes rather than a deep dive into one particular film.

Because it's a string quartet, the sound is acoustic and focused on the strings themselves, with the candles providing the lighting. The show is at The Little America Hotel in Salt Lake City on Sunday, October 18, 2026. Tickets are available through Koobit.