In the realm of real concerts. Doing my part to support game music concerts by attending Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses despite suspecting that one could make ~10 or so unique Final Fantasy music concerts before starting to reach down to the amount of good material Zelda has available. It was fine, and certainly worth the admission, but unsurprisingly had trouble measuring up to say Distant Worlds (the Final Fantasy concert) or even your average random selection of games concert, which have much longer and more richer music to draw from that translates to an orchestra better. Zelda does okay at its capital-A-adventure themes, but misses out elsewhere.
Also, since Zelda is chock full of shortish loops and area music, by necessity they were forced to do a ton of medleys, rather than the more typical (and better) "pick one song, do it straight, then do another loop with some extra frills added." Wind Waker & A Link to the Past ended up the best game arrangements. (Okay, the Majora's Mask arrangement ended up pretty good too.) No, really, I was surprised, that isn't just SNES nostalgia, they picked songs from LttP that translated to orchestra well like the opening castle raid music. Wind Waker mostly coasted on the excellent "Ocean" music which is among the best adventurey music Zelda has created with some solid support (never mind that I never actually played WW...). Twilight Princess & Ocarina of Time's medleys were kind of meh, really, which is a shame, because Twilight Princess at least certainly has some solid music in it, but among the parts I liked, they only included the TP opening which is too short. Ocarina of Time I just never was in love with the original and the arrangement didn't redeem it. They also did a medley of early Zelda dungeon music which was mostly meh (Palace music in Zelda 2 was the only saving grace), some Ocarina tunes orchestrated (okay), Kakariko Village (this actually did translate decently), Gorudo Valley (for some reason the fanbase loooves this track; it's decent, for sure, and a good pick, but still not amazing), and Ballad of the Wind Fish (pretty great, actually, best single song they presented - I wish they'd done even more with it).
Also amusingly enough, the arranger was Chad Seiter, a name I recall since I was downloading his Final Fantasy arrangements from RPGamer back in 2000 or whatever. Apparently he's actually composed for video games & movies & stuff now, so guess one of the geeky game music remixer types eventually did make it in the real world, which is kind of cool.
The weird but thankfully irrelevant part: the show's organizer/promoter rambled a bit about how this was a "Symphony of the Goddesses" with "Movements" and such (lies, the Movements were blatantly per-game medleys), which included practically being an evangelist with some comment about needing to think "on all the 3 goddesses have done for us." Um. Very little, thanks, and as for what they've done for Link, it's mostly been "empower some pyscho to conquer the world with monsters repeatedly." They even lampshade this a bit in Twilight Princess when the Twilight Realm elders complain about the cruel jape of the gods that one of the blessed chosen ones of the goddesses was a crazy dude who killed them all and did evil crap! Makes for a good adventure game setting for sure, but I'm really not getting in line to worship 'em, thanks.
