Well, I just listened to the score in its entirety. For the most part it's just not very engaging. My biggest complaint is the orchestrations are totally unimaginative. Many of the tracks progress all the way through with scarcely a single instrumentation change or climax making for a very flat listening experience. As an example of this I cite "In Noctem," "Snape & The Unbreakable Vow," "Wizard Wheezes," "Dumbledore's Speech," "Living Death," "Into the Pensieve," "The Book"...okay I think I've satisfied myself that I wasn't making an unfair statement. Granted from track to track the tone obviously shifts, but another complaint would be if there IS an overall arc to this score I certainly didn't catch it on my first listen. It also suffers from a lot of boring homophonic passages (they're all the rage these days, aren't they). When I think of Harry Potter, John Williams' constantly burbling string lines and countrapuntal brass passages are the first things to spring to mind. "CHORD - CHORD - CHORD" does not service the Potter franchise in the same way and there's too many tracks of just that in this score. Typical examples of this can be found in "Opening," "In Noctem," "Snape & The Unbreakable Vow," "Dumbledore's Speech," etc etc. There's very little within this score that carries an identity specific to the Potter Universe (with a few notable exceptions). It's generic enough that many of the tracks could just as well have been titled "Fantasy Theme #3B" and sold as needle drop production music for student or low budget films. In short, its a disappointment. Based on the first listen the only track I'll be adding to my 'Master Playlist of Awesome' is "Farewell Aragog" which although a little cliche was still a very pretty listen. I should note that I'm typically a pretty harsh first listener and grow more fond of things as I listen to them more, so I'm sure given a few more listens I'll rescind a few of the things I've said here.
