Agruably one of our personal highlights of ADE was Hardwell’s concert at the infamous Ziggo Dome together with a full Metropole Orkest. We were incredibly hyped for this event, so we didn’t expect our expectations to be exceeded. This is our party-report of the Thursday of ADE: Hardwell presents Symphony! Check out our thoughts!
ADE, which is the abbreviation of Amsterdam Dance Event, has approximately 600 events spread out over the whole week at about 150 different locations. Each has their own charm but the fact that this was going to be one of Hardwell’s very last performances for a while made it a tad more special than the others on October 18th. The Ziggo Dome is known for being a venue with a high-quality sound-system so we knew we were in for a treat.
In the line to enter it was clear that people from all over the world, as well as people from loads of different generations had united to witness the event. It’s actually not the first time we see the combination of classical music and dance-music as it has happened in the past and is now actually gaining momentum, but the fact that Hardwell allowed fans to vote for their favorite tracks of each periode of time that was going to be covered makes it a unique combo.
Upon entering the venue we clearly noticed a huge pyramid above the stage and all the spots of the orchestra which was already impressive to see. If you think about it, it’s not actually uncommon for Hardwell to have a theme with a triangle in it, as it was part of his artwork several years ago.
Real El Canario, a DJ who most of the people in the crowd probably weren’t familiar with, had the honor to be the opener for Hardwell. Admittedly, we had to do some digging too, but it turns out Real El Canario (a Spanish DJ/Producer), was a huge inspiration for Hardwell back in the days when he started DJ’ing and he has inspired a whole new generation of DJ’s. A housy sound with a bunch of funky samples took us back to the eighties and especially the older generations in the crowd were loving his vibes. It was visible that for the younger fans the warm-up, which took 1,5 hours was a bit too long for them, but it certainly managed to build-up the hype for the main-man of the night!
When Real El Canario was finished and the orchestra arrived to take their places, the stage lit up like some sort of diamond and the LED-screens started Hardwell‘s intro. As the intro already was some sort of mashup of popular dance-tracks that got the crowd ecstatic and we became that too. The function of the pyramid we mentioned before became clear: it’s the pyramid of time, that was supposed to take us on a journey through sound and time. From 1998 to 2008 like every gorgeous dance-track passed by which the fans had voted for, like ‘Summer Jam’, ‘Sky and Sand’ and ‘Adagio For Strings’ (oh this sounds absolutely incredible played by an orchestra!). As you would expect also some Swedish House Maffia and Avicii tracks and obviously many Hardwell tracks were played and these got every single generation on their feet. We don’t actually think that any important track was missed. We gotta mention though, that in the beginning when the LED-screens started showing the lyrics of the track Hardwell was playing there was like a 5-seconds delay of the music while you already saw the new lyrics. Fortunately this was fixed after a few tracks.
An emotional speech
Hardwell became a bit emotional and well aware of the fact that he wasn’t gonna perform for a long time when closing the event with a speech. He closed his speech with ”I will be back!” which made loads of fans happy, but for now nobody knows when he’ll be back. Despite that, good news for the fans: he’ll continue making music so there will be a lot of Hardwell music coming up this year!