The Last March of the Ents (Featuring Ben Del Maestro)ĥ. Retreat (Featuring “Haldir’s Lament” Performed by Elizabeth Fraser)ģ. Arwen’s Fate (Featuring “The Grace of the Valar” Performed by Sheila Chandra)ġ. One of the Dúnedain (Featuring “Evenstar” Performed by Isabel Bayrakdarian)Ĥ. The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers – The Complete Recordings 5LP blue vinyl and 3CD+blu-ray sets will be released on 27 July 2018.Ĥ. Théoden King (Featuring “The Funeral of Théodred” Performed by Miranda Otto)ģ. In the UK this new vinyl box is currently £144. The crucial thing here is that you are guaranteed to have no ‘surprise’ import VAT or associated fees – Amazon are effectively sorting that out for you. With (standard) shipping and ’s ‘import fees’ deposit paid, the total in pounds comes to £114, or thereabout. There will also be a 3CD+blu-ray audio edition which contains the same complete recordings and the hi-res 5.1 surround sound mix on the blu-ray element.Īs anyone who bought the first set will probably testify, this is one collection that it’s well worth picking up from the US. Like the previous Fellowship of The Ring package, this music to Peter Jackson’s 2002 film is housed in a collector’s box with a blue leather-style spine and it will be limited, to 8,000 individually numbered copies on blue vinyl. middling.Howard Shore‘s ‘Complete Recordings’ of the The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers will be released on vinyl for the first time in July as a 5LP blue vinyl box set. The rest may admire its ambition and the haunting set pieces, but without a deep knowledge of the film or books they will inevitably find it. And since Shore has conceived the score for all three films as a single orchestral whole, the music of the middle section by definition lacks resolution.ĭie-hard fans of Tolkien (are there any other kind?) will cherish this album as a painstaking musical description of the Middle-earth mythology.
Lotr two towers soundtrack series#
Driven by the visuals, not its own logic, it is a series of musical vignettes rather than an organic whole.
An Icelander singing in English sounds far more otherworldly than the choirs singing in Old English and Tolkiens made-up Sindarin.įine qualities aside, the soundtrack is ultimately marred by the partial nature of its form.
The closing track, "Gollum's Song", is an instant winner.Performed by Iceland's latest singing elf Emiliana Torrini (and originally intended for Bjork), this elegy is tormented, twisty, infinitely strange. But the endless succession of unresolved crescendos and the ever-escalating sense of doom get a bit much.Įlizabeth Fraser (of Cocteau Twins fame), Sheila Chandra and Isabel Bayrakdarian provide banshee accompaniment so high that it approaches ultrasound. The dark elements invoked in the earlier score now dominate as the struggle of Frodo and friends becomes more intense. It begins with the fulminant "Foundations of Stone", all serried choirs and pounding percussion. The music is mercifully far from airy-fairy. Leitmotifs are picked up from the first soundtrack, for example, the perky Hobbit anthem in "Samwise the Brave", and new ones developed as the groups diverge. With the fellowship now splintered into three, the score of the second part becomes more complex than the first, weaving between the plot strands with different musical themes. As before, he has created a full-blown orchestral score of Wagnerian proportions, each character and realm with its own musical identity. In 'The Two Towers', the difficult middle part of the Middle-earth saga, he further develops his weird aural landscape. Howard Shore won an Oscar for scoring the first part of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.