The Lord of the Rings trilogy in concert - anthems for a world in peril

Watching the entire The Lord of the Rings trilogy over a bank holiday weekend can hardly be compared to a trip to Mount Doom, but still it is no small task. It was no pain, however, to settle in for a series of screenings at the Royal Albert Hall, where Peter Jackson’s films were accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, its choir and Trinity Boys Choir. 

These events are being held to mark 25 years since the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, came out in cinemas. But they felt like a monument to something bigger: the indispensable role of music to anchor, narrate and exalt our darkening times.

It’s only on reflection that I realise how Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings score has been a companion throughout my life. One of my earliest memories is seeing The Two Towers in Reel Cinema in Burnley with my stepdad. In an empty screening, I let Forth Eorlingas wash over me as Gandalf launched into battle. I felt I had never witnessed – or heard – anything so heroic, not in a town as grey as this. Later, at university, the score defined long evenings in the library. If I made it to Caras Galadhon, which arrives just over two hours into the soundtrack, I knew it was the moment to leave on a high and go to the pub.

And now? It’s hard to dissect something I have listened to a hundred times and then a hundred times more: an absurdly elevated soundtrack to an ordinary life. It’s the light and dark, the study of contrasts. You don’t need to be in the mood to listen to it. If you listen long enough it will find you.

Shore took nearly four years on the composition, which is a dizzying tapestry of more than 100 themes. JRR Tolkien’s elves float along to a chromatic harmony of voices. Gollum is characterised by a restless cimbalom. As the shadow of evil spreads, pastoral leitmotifs fragment and distort.

This chiaroscuro is performed to staggering effect by the LPO, who also recorded the original soundtrack. I noted only a handful of missteps over more than nine hours of music, despite the many thematic lurches, especially in the second and third movies, needed to guide the viewer through parallel plot strands. Individual praise goes to Grace Davidson, the English soprano who managed to enrich the solos first recorded by Enya, Elizabeth Fraser and Annie Lennox. Like this celestial trio, Davidson belongs in upper registers where mortal voices don’t dare to venture. Gandalf’s fall has never been so stirring. 

I could single out other outstanding performers, but that would be unfair to the fellowship. The London Philharmonic Choir and the Trinity Boys Choir sing in several languages invented by Tolkien, as well as English. The orchestra, with its jungle of instruments, is as one under the lucid but ludic direction of the conductor Ludwig Wicki.

The music, of course, serves to enhance the films and their message. Depictions of fealty and medieval feudalism may not have much to offer western society today, but their broader themes – the corruption of power, the burden of responsibility, the destruction of nature – feel close at hand. 

A third of the way into the third film, beacons are lit along the White Mountains. The kingdom of Gondor has called for aid before a great war and its old allies have responded. The audience, mostly in their 30s, spontaneously, movingly erupts into applause.

Are they cheering the music or the beacons? Or perhaps both? You can feel it in the interstitial pauses between songs. A collective sense that we are, as Middle-earth was, at the deep breath before the plunge. A sense that in those beacons there is still reason to hope.

Photograph by Andy Paradise