A Marriage of Music and Movie Magic -- Live

· One children's choir.

· Multiple soloists.

· One very brave conductor with a particular knack for synchronization.

J.R.R. Tolkien devotees and music lovers alike might need to make their way to Vienna for this three-hour spectacle of sight and sound.

The first time the live accompaniment was attempted, in February in Lucerne, Switzerland, the audience "stood up and cried after the concert," recalls that bold conductor, Ludwig Wicki. "There were people who don't like the movie who went to this concert and were very impressed with how beautiful it can be if the music is in the front. It's an incredible experience."

Composer Howard Shore first got a call from director Peter Jackson when the filmmakers were almost a year into shooting the trilogy in 2000. Shore hopped on a plane to New Zealand to check out the production, and "when I saw what was going on, of course, I wanted to be a part of it," he remembers during a phone conversation from his home in Canada.

Shore, 64, immersed himself in the project, first with Tolkien legend and scholarly theory, then with crafting a score vast and varied enough to reflect the myriad characters, moods, tones and landscapes captured by the movies.

"The goal was to create as realistic an image in music as what Tolkien wrote in his great book," Shore says. "And to do that in the most truthful way that you could as a writer, so that when it went up on the screen and people watched it, they were transported to the world he created."

To that end, he worked for almost four years to create 10 hours of music for the three movies, waking and sleeping to the sounds of Middle-Earth. "And very agreeably, too," he says. "Because as daunting as it was in the beginning, the more you worked your way into the world, the more you loved it and the more you appreciated it. It had an energizing effect, in a way."