Buy it... if you are accustomed to Leonard Rosenman's dense and dissonant styles and are able to separate his interpretation of Tolkien's world from Howard Shore's.

Avoid it... if you expect Rosenman's score, despite its complexity and creative instrumentation, to in any way approach the grandeur and elegance of Shore's commonly accepted masterpieces.

Rosenman

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: (Leonard Rosenman) It's absolutely impossible to look back at Ralph Bakshi's screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and not compare it to Peter Jackson's monumental live-action efforts of the early 00's. At some point, you have to recognize that Jackson and his crew perfected Tolkien's vision on screen as best as it will ever be done, at least for a few decades to come. The 1978 version has been eclipsed on every front, and what will make it more difficult for current day fans to enjoy is just how dated its technique was. Not only was it animated, but it used a combination of traditional animation with rotoscoping, the technique of filming a live action version of the story and hand tracing each frame to make it appear semi-real. The problem that most viewers had with this process is that the rotoscoping was combined with the (often very poor) drawings at odd places, sometimes within the same frames. Another major problem was that Bakshi ran out of money before production was finished, so his film stops halfway through "The Two Towers" in chronology. Ironically, the $8 - $10 million budget yielded box office results in excess of $60 million, and yet the promised sequel never came. An animated, 97-minute television production of "The Return of the King" was shown in 1980, but without any of the same crew and mutated into a musical. Despite being critically bashed for its rotoscoping and incomplete story, The Lord of the Rings is loved by a select group of Tolkien fanatics, and the same could be said, to some degree, of film score collectors. The project was just one in a long and extremely varied career of Leonard Rosenman, spanning science-fiction and adventure realms that crossed from Fantastic Voyage to Star Trek and Robocop.

Some of Rosenman's collectors consider his The Lord of the Rings music to be among the best of career, and most will admit that it came at the height of his production. But he, like Bakshi's film, suffers from comparisons to the later live-action version of the story. In short, Rosenman's score for The Lord of the Rings simply cannot compare to Howard Shore's outstanding and universally praised contributions to the same fantasy world. Both of the approaches by Rosenman and Shore to the world of Tolkien are intelligent and complex. Both feature lyrical passages and a variety of specialty instruments. But whereas Shore was able to offer that stunning complexity of structure, theme, and instrumentation in a more transparent and satisfying mix of harmony and dissonance, Rosenman's score is rooted within the composer's own, occasionally limiting palette. Nobody will ever claim that Rosenman's work strayed towards mainstream acceptance, and this tendency to be seen as a "thinking man's composer" sometimes plays at odds with the needs of Tolkien's world, something that Shore proved with his better-conceived works. Where Rosenman succeeds is in scope and instrumentation. For his 80 minutes of score, a 100-member orchestra and a mixed chorus were employed alongside a wild collection of specialty sounds, all of which play an important role in the score. Unfortunately, Rosenman's themes are weak and his score is made so dense by design that it often reduces its effect to that of a wall of sound. On a technical level, his primary theme is as unsatisfyingly perky as the one he provided for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (and there are even similarities in progression to wonder about), though it really doesn't strike you as odd until "Riders of Rohan" and "The Dawn Battle."

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The parade-worthy fanfare presented in the final cue not only seems like an extension of the John Williams technique of the era, but is trite and falls into the trap of the animated genre's temptation to write material suitable to the overly-upbeat needs of children. The score, for the most part, is a series of massive marches and battle sequences, and during these extended cues of magnificent, dissonant bombast, Rosenman loses the ability to allow the music to breathe. In its perpetual merging of multiple audacious lines of performances, the score doesn't have the dramatic lulls and swells that it needs to ascend beyond the sum of its parts. Only the choral theme in "Mithrandir" is a distractingly strange break from the constant density, and while that cue has eerie similarities to the style of Shore for Jackson's trilogy, it is blatantly out of place on this score (and seemingly belongs on a Christmas album). Also working against Rosenman's The Lord of the Rings music is its harsh, flat recording quality. With its CD debut in early 1992 on the Intrada label (a fine production all around, especially compared to the original LP), the score was remastered from original tapes and rearranged into film order. But the sound quality of the recording still leaves much to be desired (especially, once again, compared to Shore's outrageously gorgeous recordings utilizing 25 more years of technology), and much of the effect from the chanting chorus and curious specialty instruments is lost in the lack of sonic depth. For a score of this density, that lack of dimension is critical, and while Rosenman's contribution to Tolkien's Middle Earth may have interested some fans at the time, Shore's vastly superior interpretation of the same story puts Rosenman at a distinct disadvantage. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download