Tag: TSO

Brian Chang, The Wholenote: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring premiered in Canada on December 19, 2001. That year I started high school and it was the first time I took a music class in a real music program. That Christmas, one of my friends gave me the soundtrack for the movie. I fell in love with it and have loved it ever since. For me, my entire musical history has been inspired and shaped by this soundtrack. With “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring In Concert” at Roy Thomson Hall, December 1 to 3 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, I’ve been able to perform the film’s music onstage as a chorister. It has been one of the greatest privileges of my life as a musician.

Leslie Barcza, barczablog: The Toronto Symphony, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, The Canadian Children’s Opera Company in partnership with tiff presented a concert performance of Howard Shore’s score for The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films. If you think that sounds like a lot of people, you’d be right, and that’s not even including the big-screen presentation of the film, with its cast of thousands of humans, orcs, elves, dwarves, hobbits, uruk-hai, and assorted birds. Considering that I consider the first film to be the weakest of the three, I did not expect such an overwhelming experience, and am a little gaga imagining what the other two might be like, in a live concert version.

Trish Crawford, The Toronto Star. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf and Aragorns’ valiant mission in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring will be supported full-throttle with a large chorus and soloists performing live while the movie unspools in Roy Thomson Hall. Canadian Howard Shore, who won three Oscars for his Lord of the Rings trilogy scores, notes that this new “concert and a movie” approach has livened up many a symphony hall. “The Toronto Symphony, the Mendelssohn Choir, the Children’s Opera Chorus brings more than 200 musicians to the stage to recreate the score beautifully,” he says. “They do it as a concert first, then bring in the Tolkien dialogue.”