Event info

Prime seats ISK 16.990

A zone ISK 13.990-
B zone ISK 10.990-
C zone ISK 8.990-
D zone ISK 5.990- (limited view on screen, up to 20% off)

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.
Doug Adams

The film is not suitable for children under the age of twelve.

Howard Shore, Composer
Howard Shore is one of today’s premier composers whose music is performed in concert halls around the world by the most prestigious orchestras and is heard in cinemas across the globe.

Shore’s musical interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s imaginative world of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, as portrayed in the films directed by Peter Jackson, have enthralled people of all generations for years. This work stands as his most acclaimed composition to date awarding him with three Academy Awards, four Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes as well as numerous critic’s and festival awards.

He is an officer of the Order of Canada, an Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la France and the recipient of Canada’s Governor General’s Performing Arts Award. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures honored Howard Shore with an award for Career Achievement for Music Composition and the City of Vienna bestowed him with the Max Steiner Award. Shore has received numerous other awards for his career achievements.

Perhaps most notable from his early career, Shore was one of the creators of Saturday Night Live and served as musical director from 1975 – 1980. At the same time, he began collaborating with David Cronenberg and has since scored 15 of the director’s films, including The Fly, Crash, and Naked Lunch. He was awarded Canadian Screen Awards for Maps to the Stars for score and Cosmopolis for both score and song. His original scores to A Dangerous Method, Eastern Promises and Dead Ringers were each honoured with a Genie Award. Shore continues to distinguish himself with a wide range of projects, from Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, The Departed, The Aviator (for which he won his third Golden Globe Award) and Gangs of New York to Ed Wood, Se7en, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Mrs. Doubtfire and the score for Tom McCarthy’s Academy Award-winning film Spotlight.

Other recent works include the piano concerto Ruin and Memory for Lang Lang (2010), the song cycle A Palace Upon the Ruins featuring mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano (2014), a cello concerto Mythic Gardens featuring Sophie Shao (2012), and Fanfare for the Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia (2008).

His opera, The Fly (2008), which premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and at Los Angeles Opera, recently completed a successful run in Germany at Theatre Trier.