Nasty hobbitses! Why do you make poor Gollum listen to your awful symphony?

It's unclear how much of this "symphony" is Howard Shore's, and how much of it is the effort of "Artistic Advisor & Music Editor" John Mauceri. True, Shore is credited with writing and orchestrating all the music to the film, but I wonder if he just turned Mauceri loose on the cues, saying, "Here, throw something together for me."

I like Howard Shore's film music. He's written some outstanding horror film scores that tower above the third-rate Penderecki imitators. Did he deserve Oscars for his Lord of the Rings music? Sure, it's noble, stirring stuff when accompanying images and dialogue. But you can't simply lift the music from the movie and expect it to play well on a concert stage. It's not just Howard Shore's music; this applies to most film music. Very little of it works divorced from its original function, providing emotional illumination to images and words on a theater screen.

That's why composers extract a suite from dramatic music--not just film composers, but ballet and theater composers as well. And let's get this straight--the Lord of the Rings Symphony is not a symphony, it's a suite. It's nothing more than excerpts--far too many of them--from the film score, spliced next to each other, regardless of abstract musical considerations. A symphony is a large-scale piece, usually in four or more movements, which tells a type of story in musical terms. A good symphony doesn't need images or program notes to accompany the music. The sounds themselves are arranged in such a way that nothing else is needed to experience the work. Believe it or not, the music alone can be as entertaining as a movie or a book, and in the case of the great symphonic masterpieces, much more profound.

What distinguishes a symphony from a suite, besides their respective abstract vs. dramatic conceptions, is that transitions are provided in a symphony to move the listener from one idea to the next, and these ideas are later developed, played with, elaborated upon. That's not what happens in the LOTR Symphony--we simply hop around from one musical section to the next, with no musical reason for doing so. There's plenty of worthwhile musical material in the LOTR soundtrack to provide a resourceful composer with main and secondary themes for a symphony. But I suspect that the reason the LOTR Symphony is just a patchwork quilt of film cues is that there just wasn't enough money to make it worth a Hollywood composer's time to take a year off to construct a solid piece of music that could exist outside of a motion picture. I can think of only one concert-length piece of music derived from a film score, and that is Prokofiev's magnificent cantata from Alexander Nevsky. There are a handful of 20-minute-long suites that work well in the concert hall: Thomson's Louisiana Story, The Plow That Broke the Plains, and The River; Corigliano's The Red Violin, and Three Hallucinations (derived from Altered States); Bernstein's On the Waterfront; Hermann's Psycho Suite. Unfortunately, these are the exceptions, not the rule, and the LOTR Symphony is a textbook example of this rule. Cut down to a half hour or less, [music from] The Lord of the Rings would no doubt be a much more enjoyable work.

Before the concert began, a gentleman walked onstage and informed us how lucky we all were that we would get to the hear the LOTR Symphony in its entirety. The only fortunate people present that I could imagine were those suffering from insomnia, whose restlessness would be cured about 20 minutes into the program.