The Lord of the Rings Symphony by Howard Shore with Montreal Orchestra
Composer Howard Shore brings J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary imagination to vivid life with his Academy®- and Grammy® Award-winning score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Shore’s music expresses Peter Jackson’s film as an immense symphonic work—a uniquely developed vision drawn from centuries of stylistic tendencies.
The music of The Lord of the Rings is counted among film music’s most complex and comprehensive works. This unique performance sets the score to the film, but allows the music to bear the narrative weight, creating a wholly new and dramatic live concert experience.
Shore’s score not only captures Fellowship’s sweeping emotion, thrilling vistas and grand journeys, but also echoes the very construction of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Styles, instruments and performers collected from around the world provide each of Tolkien’s cultures with a unique musical imprint. In operatic fashion, these musical worlds commingle, sometimes combining forces for a culminated power, other times violently clashing… and always bending to the will of the One Ring and its own ominous family of themes.
Says Howard Shore, “My first score for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, was the beginning of my journey into the world of Tolkien and I will always hold a special fondness for the music and the experience.”
1. Prologue – 1:20
2. The Shire – 5:17
3. The Black Riders – 8:47