A Marriage of Music and Movie Magic -- Live

By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 16, 2008

On Wednesday and Thursday, the epic film "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" will be shown on giant screens above the lawn at Wolf Trap. But what might well outshine the journey to Middle-Earth will be the sounds that accompany it: the full score performed live in sync with the movie.

It's only the second time Wolf Trap has endeavored to marry the live performance of a full score and its movie, and what was required to make it happen is beyond daunting:

· Three years and nine months of intense composing.

· A complete revision of the original work.

· 75 musicians in a full symphony orchestra.

· One professional choir.

· 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."

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.