Program

Part One

Prologue: One Ring To Rule Them All
The Shire
Bag End
Very Old Friends
Farewell Dear Bilbo
Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe
A Conspiracy Unmasked
Three Is Company
Saruman the White
A Shortcut to Mushrooms
Strider
The Nazgûl
Weathertop
The Caverns of Isengard
Give Up the Halfling
Orthanc
Rivendell
The Sword That Was Broken
The Council of Elrond Assembles
The Great Eye

INTERMISSION

Part Two

The Pass of Caradhras
The Doors of Durin
Moria
Gollum
Balin’s Tomb
Khazad-dûm
Caras Galadhon
The Mirror of Galadriel
The Fighting Uruk-hai
Parth Galen
The Departure of Boromir
The Road Goes Ever On...

Doug Adams on the Score

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. The rural and simple hobbits are rooted in a dulcet weave of Celtic tones. The mystical Elves merit ethereal Eastern colors. The Dwarves, Tolkien’s abrasive stonecutters, receive columns of parallel harmonies and a rough, guttural male chorus. The industrialized hordes of Orcs claim Shore’s most violent and percussive sounds, including Japanese taiko drums, metal bell plates and chains beaten upon piano wires, while the world of Men, flawed yet noble heirs of Middle-earth, is introduced with stern and searching brass figures. 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.

The music’s vast scope calls for symphony orchestra, mixed chorus, boys chorus and instrumental and vocal soloists singing in the Tolkien-crafted languages Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdûl, Adûnaic, Black Speech, as well as English. Original folk songs stand alongside diatonic hymns, knots of polyphony, complex tone clusters and seething, dissonant aleatoric passages. It is purposeful, knowing writing, as contained in execution as it is far-reaching in influence; for within this broad framework resides a remarkably concise musical vision. Shore’s writing assumes an earthy, grounded tone built on sturdy orchestral structures and a sense of line that is at once fluid yet stripped of frivolous ornamentation.

Says Howard Shore, “I have long admired the 21st Century Orchestra and I am very happy that they will perform the piece with conductor Ludwig Wicki. 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.”