Ghent and the World Soundtracks awards

This weekend I went to meet some StreamingSoundracks.com friends for another meet and greet in Ghent. Reason for this is that Ghent hosts every year the World Soundtracks awards. The weekend consisted of having fun with good laughs, good dinners and a lot of good Belgian beers.

The World soundtrack awards started at the same time as our meet and greet with a press conference on the Saturday. This press conferences was held with Hans Zimmer, Elliot Goldenthal and the Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski. It was quite stunning for me to see Hans so close and personal. I thought he was very open and talkative. Elliot on the other hand was having a huge hang-over (like I was having at that time) or had jet-lag problems. Maybe a bit of both. Our new SST stand was just outside the conference room and very visible for the press, fans as well as the composers! After the conference we had a nice chat with all kind of people like Robert from Krakow, Nancy from the US, Paul from score magazine and a lot of interested visitors. And of course we can add pictures with our ambassador Ad together with composers to our collection.

The afternoon was spent with old and new SST friends down town. The city Ghent is a very nice city with lots of things to see.

The concert was held in the evening. The first half consisted of announcing the award winners. The best composer was Alexander Desplat for the third time. The best soundtrack was Inception from Hans Zimmer. The rest can be found on World soundtrack award news. Also music was played from Abel Korzeniowski and Giorgio Moroder. Especially Moroder’s music was very enjoyable. It was quite interesting how his music (from origin electronical) was converted to a full orchestra.

After the break it was time to pay tribute to Ronni Chasen a press agent for composers who was brutally murdered last year. Elliot Goldenthal did by a suite of Titus and Alien 3. Especially Titus was quite enjoyable with the choir. Sadly Howard Shore could not make it to the festival. He gave the conductor Dirk Brossé a message who read it to the audience. After that Shore’s music was played with of course also a Lord of the Rings track.

Last but not least it was Hans Zimmer his turn. Zimmer brought his own musicians and performed a very nice Driving Miss Daisy. His first score. When we got back after the break I noticed a lot of trombones in the orchestra. After Driving Miss Daisy I found out why… It was time for one of his last scores: a suite from the movie Inception. That piece was quite a power house. It almost blew the audience away. what an awesome piece of music it was! A guy in front of me recorded it. So if you do not mind the bad quality you can check out his youtube movie of the Inception suite.

All in all a very fun weekend, with lots of friends, beer and film music. Thanks goes to Ad for organizing, Stefan for driving and Nathanael for the photos!