Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(67 customer reviews) 151 of 159 people found the following review helpful
There is some good in this world!,
November 7, 2006 G. Kroener (Bamberg, Bavaria Germany) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers (The Complete Recordings) (Audio CD)
It is 2002. Howard Shore just finished scoring David Cronenberg's "Spider" and David Fincher's "Panic Room" before he stepped to the podium of the Kodiak Theatre to pick up his first, well- deserved Academy Award for "Fellowship Of The Ring". Film score enthusiasts all over the world wondered whether his success at the Oscars would affect the upcoming second part of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, "The Two Towers". After all, it wouldn't have been the first blockbuster to get destroyed by its success.
All worries were unfounded because luckily, Howard Shore is still one of the composers who prefer artistic integrity over success.
But the big question remained: after recording not only a tremendously successful score, but also an enormous work of Wagnerian proportions, how could you take that up a notch? It's simple, you don't. Two Towers is not a sequel to Fellowship, it is its continuation. This answer is deceptively simple, but understanding it is the key to...Read more
46 of 55 people found the following review helpful
Beautiful Music, Painfully Priced,
November 15, 2006 Paul R. Potts "Software Developer" (Ann Arbor, MI United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers (The Complete Recordings) (Audio CD)
I wrote an extensive review for the Fellowship of the Rings complete recordings, and most of what I wrote for that set applies here. This is wonderful music. Although it suffers a bit from being the middle movie (the themes feel less new, although there are new themes), I love hearing Miranda Otto's funeral lament in Old English and the full version of Gollum's Song, which is a wonderfully cathartic piece.
The box configuration is identical, including the impractical rubber "nub" for the audio DVD. The box is pretty, but it will not stay closed properly on the shelf, the glued-down paper wrapping will tend to snag and tear on the inside corners when you pull out the contents, and the box itself is prone to coming apart at the seams rather easily.
The DVD is still of somewhat dubious value, because of lack of widespread support for higher-bit-rate audio formats, and the fact that it is copy-protected, making it difficult, although far from impossible, to do...Read more
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Truly a Work of Art,
November 15, 2006 Robert Shepard Jr. (USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers (The Complete Recordings) (Audio CD)
There are a couple of different ways you could approach the music of Howard Shore's complete "The Two Towers" film score. The simplest would be to just pop one of the CDs into your player, lean back and let this gorgeous music wash over you, carrying you away to Middle Earth. Or you could use the excellent 45-page program guide to help you explore the music more methodically.
As with the complete "Fellowship of the Ring", there is an excellent write-up on each of the major themes appearing in "The Two Towers". Some of the language can get pretty technical, such as this excerpt from page 29: "The keening rhaita and swelling mixed chorus return, bolstered by weighty brass writing, thicker accompanying textures, many aleatoric, and increased orchestral doublings." It was very helpful of the publisher to define "aleatoric" in a footnote. As for the rhaita, you can see a picture of it on page 41. It looks like some sort of woodwind instrument.
And that's...Read more
