J.R.R. Tolkien's: The Lord Of The Rings - Soundtrack

God knows I'm no Bakshi fan. How anyone ever trusted this hack to even make half a movie about The Lord of the Rings I'll never know!But one thing he did right was to tap Leonard Rosenman to score his film! Wonderful music full of delightful symphonic surprises, there are even some parts that bring thoughts of Broadway.I don't know if you have to have some nostalgia from hearing it for the first time backing a truly awful film to like it. All I know is I can enjoy this musical score over and over again while totally disregarding the movie itself.But it. You won't regret it.

This is a short highly abbreviated version of the first two books of the "Lord of the Rings" done by Ralph Bakshi using the rotoscoping version of animation that gave the characters a bit more weight and realism than a mere cartoon would suggest. While this movie did anger some die- hards, there were a few pluses. This followed the book far more faithfully than some other renderings and here, Frodo showed a somewhat harder edge. The landscape was for the most part dark and moody, and the Black Riders were fearsome credible monsters. The main drawback was Sam, who acted and sounded more clownish than expected and this made him somewhat annoying. The other Characters behaved more as expected. The elves were depicted, tall and beautiful as Tolkien meant them to be, and Gollum was passible. We only caught a brief glimpse of an Ent within Fanghorn Forest. The battle at Helms Deep was shown rather bloody, but that was also expected, since this was not for the Toddler set. While this movie was very brief, having to cover so much material within a short span of time, it was watchable, and I found myself reading the books to see what I had missed.

I'm not going to compare this to the Peter Jackson/Loreena Mckennitt soundtrack in detail because I only own this version. Suffice it to say I generally prefer originals to remakes, and this is no exception. I remember this on LP years ago and loved it. I missed it for years when LP's went away and am thrilled it's finally available on CD. This was remastered well. The sounds are crisp, and the volume is even and strong across all songs. It's a great recording of a great performance. If you preferred the books to the movies, you'll probably prefer this soundtrack to the new one because it was made less than a decade after Tolkien's death and better evokes the fantasy imagery envisioned by his generation.

This is a great soundtrack for a classic, cult film.Leonard Rosenman did the music and I think it really fit the film well.My only complaint would be that Rosenman also did Star Trek 4 and used many of the same themes - including the main theme, much the same way James Horner did Aliens, which sounds suspiciously like Star Trek 2 and 3. Maybe it has something to do with Star Trek, I don't know...

Not Howard Shore. Not John Williams. BUT this has some great cuts of an orchestra and sound studio pushing the limit in collaboration with a composer and conductor. I remember first hearing the last three cuts at a Sam Goody in the '70's. the fidelity and engineering was hair raising. Give a listen just for kicks.

Delivered damaged. The edition is ok, is it worth the extra bucks, no.The poster is a bit rubbish resolution wise, the golumn postcard looks terrible - barely recognisable, pretty embaressing really. The film cell looks ok and the sticker is a bit meh, the booklet is a nice accompanying element...The records sound ok. the

First, I should point out that this is **not** the product page for Howard Shore's soundtrack for the new Peter Jackson-directed film "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring." This product page and this review are for Leonard Rosenman's soundtrack for Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated feature "The Lord of the Rings." Bakshi's film, which I regret never having seen, is hated by many fans of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, although it is widely acknowledged that the film has some virtues. On the evidence of this CD it would appear that to a great extent the film's incidental music is, in fact, one of its virtues.Rosenman's score is quite a different listening experience from Shore's. This "Rings" is far more dissonant, revealing Rosenman's background as an avant-garde composer. There are fewer easily hummable melodies than in Shore's score, and choral singing is somewhat less prominent. There is, however, a lament sung in Lothlorien, and in scenes involving the Black Riders the chorus sings "Mordor... Mordor..." quite chillingly (arguably achieving a more frightening effect than Shore's choral theme for the Black Riders). During the Battle of Helm's Deep (the climax of Bakshi's film, a planned sequel to which was never made) the chorus sings a more elaborate Orc battle-song. Rosenman's score also contains fewer pleasant-sounding passages than Shore's, perhaps because the larger scale on which Jackson's version of "LOTR" is conceived allowed Shore to luxuriate over such pleasant stretches of the story as the sequences in the Shire and Rivendell.Tolkien purists will find several reasons to criticize the lament and the battle-song, both of which, however, I enjoyed. The lament features a children's chorus and an adult one, both representing Elves of Lothlorien. An analysis of all of Tolkien's writings indicates that there would not have been nearly as many Elf-children in Lothlorien at the end of the Third Age as this chorus would have us believe. This can be forgiven: many of the writings in question were not published until the 1990's, long after the production of Bakshi's film, and the children's chorus tugs on the heartstrings in the intended way. More seriously, the lament is sung in English. In Tolkien's books and the various theatrical and cinematic adaptations thereof, English supposedly represents a fictional ancient tongue called the Common Speech, which most Elves of Lothlorien did not speak. In Shore's score a lament is sung in Lothlorien in two Elvish languages, which makes better sense. Moreover, Rosenman's statement in the liner notes that the lyrics (which he did not write) of the lament are "a true piece of poetry" is, in my opinion, an overstatement. I like the Tolkienian grandeur of the lines "...long may your name be sung / Through kingdoms of starlight / And realms of the Sun," but the concluding lines, "You will dwell in our hearts forever / Never more will we stand alone," seem to me too hackneyed to be moving (and are sung a little too loudly and forcefully).What may infuriate Tolkien purists most, however, is that Rosenman invented the language for the Orcs' battle-song (except for the word "Mordor"). This seems quite inappropriate for a film set in a fictional world whose creator invented about fifteen languages for the use of its inhabitants. Shore's score is more linguistically faithful to Tolkien's creation; all the singing in Jackson's film is in one of Tolkien's invented languages or in English.Nonetheless, the tremendous energy of the Helm's Deep sequence, including the singing of the Orcs, is one of the main attractions of Rosenman's score. This passage will be a tough act for Shore to follow when he scores Jackson's version of the Helm's Deep sequence in "The Two Towers"; however, I am certain Shore is up to the task. In any case, Rosenman's score is a work of high artistic integrity, full of enjoyable moments and fully worthy of Rosenman's illustrious record as a film composer.