A Marriage of Music and Movie Magic -- Live

It led to Shore's winning Academy Awards for best original score with his work on "The Fellowship of the Ring" in 2001 and "Return of the King" in 2003. The middle film of the trilogy, "The Two Towers," came out in 2002.

Shore was almost at the end of the composing process when a colleague warned that the score, written to be performed in a recording studio, might not translate into a work that could be performed live without extensive revisions. "So it was really about creating a new score," he says. Shore first condensed the three-hour score from "Fellowship" into a 50-minute symphony, then turned it back into a three-hour score that could be performed live alongside the movie.

Wicki had followed the composer's work for years (Shore wrote the scores for such films as "The Silence of the Lambs" and "The Departed") and three years ago staged a retrospective concert of Shore's music.

Shore attended the retrospective and was impressed, so when the idea of staging a live accompaniment of "Rings" began to take shape, he tasked Wicki with the endeavor, calling the undertaking "heroic."

Next week's concert marks the U.S. premiere of the live "Fellowship" score. The only other movie Wolf Trap has presented with feature-length accompaniment is "The Wizard of Oz."

"The whole thing has been an adventure. It's really expensive and big. It's quite a hard thing to conduct," Wicki says, adding that the biggest challenge is keeping pace precisely with the film.

But, the conductor adds, the scope of Shore's piece is also what makes it so dramatic. "He has so many beautiful details in his music," Wicki says. "The variety of styles he can write is immense -- and in this score he used all of them."

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Wednesday and Thursday at 8:30 at Wolf Trap, Filene Center, 1551 Trap Rd., Vienna.$25 to $55. http://www.wolftrap.org. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Wednesday and Thursday at 8:30 at Wolf Trap, Filene Center, 1551 Trap Rd., Vienna.$25 to $55. http://www.wolftrap.org.