Kyle Reinhart is a Los Angeles-based composer, guitarist, and producer whose original stage score for The Return of Zorro earned praise from the Los Angeles Times for sounding like “a Hollywood blockbuster.” His music fuses post-Romantic orchestration – think Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and Morricone – with the electric guitar lineage of Hendrix, Page, and Beck. Stream The Return of Zorro on Spotify.
Who Is Kyle Reinhart?
Kyle Reinhart is a composer, guitarist, orchestrator, arranger, and producer based in Los Angeles. A Berklee College of Music graduate (Contemporary Writing & Production, Class of 2023), he’s spent more than 15 years performing throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and LA, building a catalog that moves fluidly between film, theater, and live rock performance.
His live résumé reads like a tour of the rooms that actually matter to working musicians: The Viper Room, The Whisky a Go Go, Hotel Café, Herb Alpert’s Vibrato Grill Jazz, and the Marciac Jazz Festival in France. He’s also shared stages and studio credits with artists including Allen Stone, DAME, Walk On Mars, Angie Polizzi, Brenna Whitaker, and Emmy Barone, with arrangements performed at the Berklee Performance Center, MGM Music Hall at Fenway, and Agganis Arena.
But the through-line in all of it is the same: music built to feel bigger than the room it’s played in.
The Sound: Where Stravinsky Meets Jimmy Page
Kyle Reinhart describes his own mission simply – building a world where symphonic composition and rock aren’t separate genres, but part of the same story. In practice, that means his writing pulls from two lineages at once:
- The orchestral side: Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ennio Morricone, Jerry Goldsmith, and James Horner – composers known for scale, tension, and melodic memorability.
- The guitar side: Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck – players who treated the electric guitar as a lead voice, not a rhythm-section afterthought.
Layer in post-Romantic orchestration and Latin-inspired rhythmic influences, and you get a sound that doesn’t sit neatly on either a “rock” or “film score” playlist it demands its own category.
The Song: "The Return of Zorro"
The clearest showcase of that sound is Kyle Reinhart’s original score for the stage production The Return of Zorro – a soundtrack built to do exactly what a film score does: shape the emotional landscape of a story and make an audience feel like they’re inside a bigger world than the one in front of them.
It worked. Director Brian Newell told the Los Angeles Times that when you hear Kyle Reinhart’s theme, you’d think it came from a Hollywood blockbuster. The Orange County Register singled out the score’s atmospheric opening theme and its darker transitional passages for channeling the tension and mood of classic film composers like Morricone while still carrying Reinhart’s own electric, guitar-forward identity through every scene change.
That’s the balance that makes The Return of Zorro worth a close listen: it’s a stage score written with a rock guitarist’s instincts, and a rock song written with a film composer’s patience.
🎧 Stream the soundtrack: The Return of Zorro on Spotify