by Danny Graydon
November 6th is a red-letter day for collectors of film music - and rampant devotees of a certain fantasy film franchise. Reprise/WMG Records will be releasing the grand finale of their incredibly impressive ‘Complete Recordings’ sets of Howard Shore’s masterful and complex scores for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings movies, which have been honored with three Academy Awards, four Grammy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King — The Complete Recordings will be the largest of the trio, a sumptuous five-disc affair with four compact discs containing all three hours and fifty minutes of Shore’s music on the Extended cut of the film (available on DVD) and a fifth DVD-Audio disc that contains the entire score again in digital surround sound. Like the prior two sets, the above will be contained in deluxe packaging with all-new artwork and hugely informative liner notes by Doug Adams, author of the forthcoming book The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films.
Performed by London Philharmonic Orchestra, The London Voices and The London Oratory School, the ROTK score features vocal performances by Renée Fleming, Sissel, Ben Del Maestro and, of course, pop chanteuse Annie Lennox, whose beautifully elegiac end-credits song “Into The West” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song (and, conveniently, Lennox’s appearance on this set will doubtless provide a nice PR boost to her fourth solo album, Songs of Mass Destruction, released this week). The score also features solos performed by renowned flautist Sir James Galway.
For many, myself among them, Shore’s Rings scores are a mesmerizing achievement in modern film music. Indeed, they’re practically unrivalled: the only remotely compatible work of recent times would be John Williams’ six Star Wars scores and their overall impact has been diluted by the comparative weakness of the Prequel works (1999, 2002, 2005) the album presentation of which are simply atrocious, cues inexplicably sequenced out of order and, far worse, ending abruptly due to the editing changes to the film once the score had been applied. Shore’s work – both on film and album - suffers from no such inconsistency: his compositions display a profoundly impressive prowess in weaving together dozens of themes and maintaining a startling consistency in its generation and maintenance of rich drama and emotion. Wonderfully, the Complete Recordings sets allow for this to be experienced in full – in one marathon 12-hour stint, if you want.
On the other hand, it would be remiss to be entirely taken in by the hype, the phenomenal box-office and the awards and assume that Shore’s scores for Jackson’s globe-gobbling trilogy are universally loved. Not so: many is the time that I have been playfully harangued for my affection for Shore’s music for Middle Earth. Do I not get bored by the hugely overblown, cod-operatic bombast of it all? The irritatingly twee emotional themes? The endless bloody choirs? The presence of Enya? All that for a film about walking??
Certainly, I can appreciate it’s not for everyone, but my standard response to such criticism is to tell them something that the late, great Elmer Bernstein told me in an interview: “A good film score makes you feel…”.This is something that the Rings scores achieves in glorious abundance, above and beyond their abounding success in capturing musically the nuances of Tolkien’s vivid cultures and environments.
Yet, whatever your opinion, the release of The Complete Recordings – all of which offer 60-75% of previously-unreleased music on top of the original CD releases – have set a considerable new benchmark in the commercial release of archival-quality orchestral soundtracks in their entirety, much as the Extended versions of the films raised the bar of special edition DVD releases. For the eager film music collector, they are must-have fare, providing a superb opportunity to enjoy the full – and vast - scope of one of the greatest film scores of our times.
Danny Graydon is a UK-based freelance journalist and critic. He writes for EMPIRE, Variety Weekly, The First Post, SFX, SciFiNow, International Film Guide and is the co-author of The Rough Guide to Film Noir.
(c) Danny Graydon 2007
November 6th is a red-letter day for collectors of film music - and rampant devotees of a certain fantasy film franchise. Reprise/WMG Records will be releasing the grand finale of their incredibly impressive ‘Complete Recordings’ sets of Howard Shore’s masterful and complex scores for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings movies, which have been honored with three Academy Awards, four Grammy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King — The Complete Recordings will be the largest of the trio, a sumptuous five-disc affair with four compact discs containing all three hours and fifty minutes of Shore’s music on the Extended cut of the film (available on DVD) and a fifth DVD-Audio disc that contains the entire score again in digital surround sound. Like the prior two sets, the above will be contained in deluxe packaging with all-new artwork and hugely informative liner notes by Doug Adams, author of the forthcoming book The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films.
Performed by London Philharmonic Orchestra, The London Voices and The London Oratory School, the ROTK score features vocal performances by Renée Fleming, Sissel, Ben Del Maestro and, of course, pop chanteuse Annie Lennox, whose beautifully elegiac end-credits song “Into The West” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song (and, conveniently, Lennox’s appearance on this set will doubtless provide a nice PR boost to her fourth solo album, Songs of Mass Destruction, released this week). The score also features solos performed by renowned flautist Sir James Galway.
For many, myself among them, Shore’s Rings scores are a mesmerizing achievement in modern film music. Indeed, they’re practically unrivalled: the only remotely compatible work of recent times would be John Williams’ six Star Wars scores and their overall impact has been diluted by the comparative weakness of the Prequel works (1999, 2002, 2005) the album presentation of which are simply atrocious, cues inexplicably sequenced out of order and, far worse, ending abruptly due to the editing changes to the film once the score had been applied. Shore’s work – both on film and album - suffers from no such inconsistency: his compositions display a profoundly impressive prowess in weaving together dozens of themes and maintaining a startling consistency in its generation and maintenance of rich drama and emotion. Wonderfully, the Complete Recordings sets allow for this to be experienced in full – in one marathon 12-hour stint, if you want.
On the other hand, it would be remiss to be entirely taken in by the hype, the phenomenal box-office and the awards and assume that Shore’s scores for Jackson’s globe-gobbling trilogy are universally loved. Not so: many is the time that I have been playfully harangued for my affection for Shore’s music for Middle Earth. Do I not get bored by the hugely overblown, cod-operatic bombast of it all? The irritatingly twee emotional themes? The endless bloody choirs? The presence of Enya? All that for a film about walking??
Certainly, I can appreciate it’s not for everyone, but my standard response to such criticism is to tell them something that the late, great Elmer Bernstein told me in an interview: “A good film score makes you feel…”.This is something that the Rings scores achieves in glorious abundance, above and beyond their abounding success in capturing musically the nuances of Tolkien’s vivid cultures and environments.
Yet, whatever your opinion, the release of The Complete Recordings – all of which offer 60-75% of previously-unreleased music on top of the original CD releases – have set a considerable new benchmark in the commercial release of archival-quality orchestral soundtracks in their entirety, much as the Extended versions of the films raised the bar of special edition DVD releases. For the eager film music collector, they are must-have fare, providing a superb opportunity to enjoy the full – and vast - scope of one of the greatest film scores of our times.
Danny Graydon is a UK-based freelance journalist and critic. He writes for EMPIRE, Variety Weekly, The First Post, SFX, SciFiNow, International Film Guide and is the co-author of The Rough Guide to Film Noir.
(c) Danny Graydon 2007