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The Two Towers COMPLETE RECORDINGS 3CD set


Marian Schedenig

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Hooray for Miranda Otto beerchug

 



THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS
THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS
SET FOR RELEASE November 7, 2006

Available For The First Time!
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings

Howard Shore's complete Grammy-winning score for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, from the epic film trilogy The Lord of the Rings, will be available in a deluxe four-disc edition from Reprise/WMG Soundtracks on November 7, 2006.

This historic release contains over 180 minutes of music on three CDs, comprising the full score of the 2002 film, composed by Howard Shore. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Complete Recordings marks the second edition of the three complete recording releases of the film trilogy whose score has been honored with three Academy Awards, four Grammy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards, and which has sold over 6 million copies worldwide. This deluxe set also includes exclusive new artwork, packaging, extensive liner notes written by Doug Adams, and "Gollum's Song" performed by Emiliana Torrini.

Composed for symphony orchestra and choir, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Complete Recordings was performed by London Philharmonic Orchestra, The London Voices, The London Oratory School Schola featuring vocal performances by Emiliana Torrini, Isabel Bayrakdarian, Sheila Chandra, Elizabeth Fraser, Ben Del Maestro and cast member Miranda Otto.

The fourth disc is a DVD-Audio presenting the entire The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Complete Recordings in 5.1 Surround Sound.

The boxed set for the complete recordings of the first film, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - The Complete Recordings, was released on December 13, 2005 . It spent months in Amazon.com's top 100 Sales Ranking, and garnered some of the best reviews of the year. "For fans of any of The Lord of the Rings films, The Fellowship of the Ring/Complete Recordings is an essential experience" - Heather Phares, All Music Guide. "The Complete Recordings is last year's most important archival soundtrack release, expanding and preserving one of the finest and most significant recent scores in all of film music. Shore's Lord Of The Rings trilogy is an operatic symphony that is among the finest musical accomplishments of the last half-century. The plethora of unreleased material on this beautifully packaged edition is mouth-watering at the least, and the sonic dynamic achieved on the surround sound DVD of the entire 180-minute score is simply astonishing." - Randall Larson, Music From the Movies

Composer of over sixty-five film scores, Howard Shore brought a lifetime of experience to creating the epochal soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Shore used Tolkien's texts and drew from multiple periods throughout music history to evoke the book's enchanted worlds. He developed over 80 leitmotifs to describe the cultures of Middle-earth . Collaborating with authors/lyrists Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, he composed choral music utilizing the Tolkien-created languages for the Elves (Quenya and Sindarin), the Dwarves (Khuzdul), Men (Adunaic) and the evil cultures of Mordor (Black Speech). For Rohan, all the choral text was set in Old English.

In 2003, working with conductor John Mauceri, Shore created The Lord of the Rings Symphony, a two-hour 6 movement concert piece drawing from the nearly 12 hours of music he composed for Peter Jackson's landmark film trilogy. This piece features a full symphony orchestra, adult and children's choirs, as well as solo instrumentalists and vocalists, totaling more than 200 musicians on stage. Since its debut in November 2003 in Wellington, New Zealand, The Lord of the Rings Symphony has been performed in sold-out concerts on four continents and in some of the world's most legendary venues, including London's Royal Albert Hall, Moscow's Kremlin Palace Theater and Sydney's Opera House . Some of the world's leading international orchestras - including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony and London Philharmonic - have performed The Lord of the Rings Symphony in addition to regional orchestras across the United States, and this past July, the symphony celebrated its 100th performance by the San Francisco Symphony.

The UK's Classic FM voted The Lord of the Rings soundtracks the Best Film Score of All Time for five consecutive years. Shore's other impressive film credits include Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (Golden Globe Award), David Fincher's Se7en and Panic Room, Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, and 11 films with David Cronenberg including A History of Violence and Spider. Shore is currently writing an opera based on his film collaboration with Cronenberg, The Fly, commissioned for the Los Angeles Opera, and he is also completing work on his fifth collaboration with Martin Scorsese, The Departed, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg.

Says Shore of his time on The Lord of the Rings, "Everybody felt that we were working on something important. It was a film that welcomed the intensity of our efforts. As much as we put into it, it showed us more. It was endlessly revealing working on The Lord of the Rings."

 

 

 

ADMIN NOTE:
Click HERE to jump to the reveal of the cover art

Click HERE to jump to the reveal of the track list
Click HERE to jump to the reveal of the track TIMES
And click HERE to jump to when the first JWFanner received his set and actual discussion of the release begins!

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Hey the TTT OST is not that bad!

Anyway I think the TTT is the LotR score I am the least familiar with. I do not know why but somehow FotR and RotK have received more attention from me than the middle part. I am waiting very enthusiastically to hear the complete TTT score as there are so many unreleased highlights in it (well the same can be said about all three LotR scores). And there is more of a sense of discovering something new as I do not know the score so well.

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Thanks Marc! It is good to be back. A month long vacation without a computer was little painful and have done some catching up in the net reading the latest film music news amoung other things.

And nope, no rants and hissy fits this time. I have FotR CR now to keep me company. It will keep the worst panic away. :sigh:

And I think that fasting last year was not very good for me or for anyone else for that matter.

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Are you going on a LotR vast and freak us all out with your withdrawal problems again? :sigh:

I haven't listened to FOTR:CE in a while. I also haven't listened to TTT ever since FOTR:CE came out, and I think the same applies to ROTK. And I haven't seen the movies since last year.

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I will be doing that. Even if my ears start to bleed half way through I will still do it! Think about it, at least 11 hours of continous LotR music :sigh:

And Marian I have not listened FotR CR in a while either. I have been concentrating on a Sibelius CD boxed set: Complete Symphonies and Tone Poems conducted by Paavo Berglund. Excellent music.

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And Marian I have not listened FotR CR in a while either. I have been concentrating on a Sibelius CD boxed set: Complete Symphonies and Tone Poems conducted by Paavo Berglund. Excellent music.

Me neither. I'm concentrating on the Elmer Bernstein box at the moment.

:wave: Wuthering Heights (Alfred Newman)

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This is the definition of tone poem in Wikipedia:

A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, in one movement, in which some extra-musical programme provides a narrative or illustrative element. This programme could come from a poem, a novel, a painting or some other source. Music based on extra-musical sources is often known as program music, while music which has no other associations is known as absolute music. A series of tone poems may be combined in a suite, in the romantic rather than the baroque sense: "The Swan of Tuonela" (1895) is a tone poem from Sibelius Lemminkäinen Suite.

I hope this clarifies the term for you enough. :thumbup:

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You do understand the concept of copy & paste, do you? Digital copies are perfect copies, meaning that no errors are introduced during the copying process - and no errors are removed either.

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I'll laugh about that when I find the time ... :P

Currently I'm trying to get my own isolated-yet-with-snippets-of-dialogue score for FOTR done before TTT.

And since the PAL version of the movie is faster but pitch- corrected, I've got to "quicken" up the CR tracks and then get them back to the correct pitch again.

Why do the LOTR people always have to be so darn pedantic? :D

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When I ripped the EE fan club credits, I dropped the speed approx. 4% and then pitched it up until it was as close a match to the CD as possible. Not difficult to do with Adobe Audition or Nero Wave Editor, don't know about anything else though.

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Why would you work on an edit for FotR if you have the Complete Recordings?

Do you get the idea of an isolated score? As far as I know, the Complete Recordings don't have videos.

I can't slow the movie down, so I have to speed up the music and then do some pitch- correction.

I have to keep the correct pitch because I'm including some dialogues.

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It's actually real fun because you can follow Howard Shore's thoughts. And you spot all those little edits in the film version of the score. The ending of Keep it Secret, Keept It Safe for instance, when Gandalf pulls sam through the window, is not in the movie.

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Hey what you are doing sounds cool Georg! :spiny: I would be interested to see and hear the results.

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In how far is this silly? I won't keep this thing to myself. I intend to watch this occasionally with friends and family, and not everyone is trained enough to understand movies in their original, English, version.

Not to mention that the German dub is quite good. And what's the difference? The content is exactly the same, nothing gets lost.

I mean, I never watch sitcoms or comedies in their dubbed versions because inevitably lots of typical English humour gets lost.

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Not to mention that the German dub is quite good. And what's the difference? The content is exactly the same, nothing gets lost.

I've watched FOTR many times. Everytime, I've cried at the end. Everytime but once - when the theatre had the wrong reel at the end and the movie suddenly switched from English to German at Amon Hen. That time, I was just shocked.

The content is the same - if by content you mean the general meaning of the words. The emotions get lost - as they do in pretty much any dub.

Dubs are evil.

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So it was surprising to you that while being p-ed at the theatre staff, you didn't cry? Yeah, that surely was the dub's fault.

What do you mean "general meaning of the word"? It's not like the LOTR scripts have such delicate subtleties, such subtle puns and wordplays in the language that they couldn't possibly be properly transferred into another one. Content, weight, attitude, everything's the same, it's just that the words are different.

Do you think the process of dubbing something into a certain language is any different from doing ADR? You have to (re-)create the atmosphere of a scene, and whether that's done in English, German, French, Spanish or any other language is irrelevant.

Do you think there's any difference between an Englishman watching the English version and a German watching the German one?

Watching a film in a foreign language is always more interesting and exciting compared to watching it in your native tongue. But that's not because the dub is better or more emotional, it's because your brain is always busy translating, even if you know the lines inside out. It's a subconscious thing.

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So it was surprising to you that while being p-ed at the theatre staff, you didn't cry? Yeah, that surely was the dub's fault.

It is. The dub was very annoying.

It's not like the LOTR scripts have such delicate subtleties, such subtle puns and wordplays in the language that they couldn't possibly be properly transferred into another one. Content, weight, attitude, everything's the same, it's just that the words are different.

Tolkien was an English professor, and chose many of his words very carefully. Even when seeing the printed German translation nowadays, I find it annoying - good and accomplished for what it is, but nevertheless a distortion.

Do you think the process of dubbing something into a certain language is any different from doing ADR? You have to (re-)create the atmosphere of a scene, and whether that's done in English, German, French, Spanish or any other language is irrelevant.

1) ADR can be worse than the original audio (there's a nice bit with Brad Pitt in the Se7en commentary where he regrets ever looping a certain scene, because after many attempts he still hadn't done it as well as back on the set)

2) ADR is done by the original actors. Actors who read the script, who got into the characters. They don't just read lines, they interpret them. I have *never* seen a dub of a live action movie where the dubbers came even close. They usually show a complete disregard for the emotional depth of the original audio, plus they hardly ever do convincing crying or anger.

3) Much of an actor's performance is how the mimics and voice match up. Translations put the words in different orders (and different lengths), and no matter how good a dub is (most aren't very good), there will always be many instances where the original actor's performance is seriously degraded because his facial expressions simply don't match the translated text anymore.

And the sad thing is, despite everything, German dubs seem to be of much higher quality than most others - but compared to the original, in nearly every case, they still suck. Often very much so. I've done some direct comparisons between English and German audio tracks on DVDs, and it's amazing (in a bad way) how much emotional depth the dubbers simply throw out of the window. Very often, it seems that they didn't even bother to read the script, or rehearse - and exposition in the dub often becomes just that: Purely informational, even if the original audio had the characters actually emoting in these sequences.

Not to mention that the German voices are often ridiculous. When Tom Hanks started his acting career, he made mostly comedies - so to this day, he's still dubbed with the squeaky Eric Idle comedy voice. Makes taking something like Saving Private Ryan seriously very hard. Voices like Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Sean Connery... they are an integral part of their characters, and just cannot be dubbed. Even Ben Kingsley, who has the best German dubbing voice I know, looses a lot in German dubs. The actor speaks well, but he doesn't impersonate the character as well.

Do you think there's any difference between an Englishman watching the English version and a German watching the German one?

For the reasons just stated, absolutely. I know two movies where I consider the German dub superior to the original English audio: Walt Disney's Robin Hood (the original voice actors don't seem very good, and Peter Ustinov just steals the show in German), and the animated LOTR (again: poor original voice actors - even John Hurt disappoints).

Watching a film in a foreign language is always more interesting and exciting compared to watching it in your native tongue. But that's not because the dub is better or more emotional, it's because your brain is always busy translating, even if you know the lines inside out. It's a subconscious thing.

My brain is busy translating because I *know* that things get lost in the translation. But that's not the point. All the reasons I just listed are important points why dubs hardly ever (supposing they are done perfectly - and usually they are done really poorly) stand a chance to be as good as the original. And both my experience and simple logic tell me that I'm not just imagining things here.

*rant end*

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Oh, you're right.

But I still want my folks to understand it.

I also prefer the original versions, but that doesn't mean they're automatically better, like you said. And what would be the alternative to dubbing? Subtitles? I'm trying to watch a movie, not to read a book.

I don't think this applies to LOTR at all, but I also very often find myself cringing at German dubs, especially in sitcoms (like I said). For instance, I got to know and love Seinfeld in its original form on DVD. And at one point, I think it was in the middle of season 4, I tried the German dub. I could NOT stand it. I really thought my ears were going to bleed. Never has the humorous essence of a show been so badly neglected.

But there's one sitcom, whose dubbing I find superior to the original, and that's Married With Children.

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But I still want my folks to understand it.

Most of of friends (i.e. pretty much all) understand English well enough. One didn't many years ago, but now does, because I wouldn't let him watch dubs when we were watching films together. I even got my grandmother to watch LOTR with subtitles. :sigh:

I also prefer the original versions, but that doesn't mean they're automatically better, like you said. And what would be the alternative to dubbing? Subtitles? I'm trying to watch a movie, not to read a book.

It works well in most other countries. Take Scandinavian countries, they don't even do dubs (except for children's movies). It may not me that much of a difference if you don't know the English language at all - but I do believe that most German people under 40 or 50 should know English reasonably well so that they can handle subtitles and still get some advantage out of it.

It's like at the opera - the Vienna State Opera has been using subtitles for several years, and it helps a lot. (Even with German stuff like Wagner, where the orchestra plays so loudly you often barely hear the singers anyway). Yet there are a few exceptions where they perform translated versions, e.g. anything by Janacek. And I can tell you this: I don't know a single word of the Czech language. But I still hear the difference, where the Czech lyrics fit the music and rhythm, and the German translation simply doesn't. Of course, the similarities to movies in this case are limited - but some still apply: The rhythm, length, and placement of words changes. Which is not that important from a purely auditive point in movies, but in contrast, you get the visuals of an actor moving his face and not matching the audio anymore.

I don't think this applies to LOTR at all, but I also very often find myself cringing at German dubs, especially in sitcoms (like I said). For instance, I got to know and love Seinfeld in its original form on DVD. And at one point, I think it was in the middle of season 4, I tried the German dub. I could NOT stand it. I really thought my ears were going to bleed. Never has the humorous essence of a show been so badly neglected.

I've long been thinking that dubbing sitcoms works this way: Someone translates the script, then they get the voice actors, put them into the recording booth and record the thing pretty much right away, with the actors not having read a single line of the script before. And apparently, judging from one of the featurettes on the Friends DVDs, that's often exactly what they do.

And of course, there's the other case of shows that are either nearly untranslatable or simply translated by someone who doesn't understand the original scripts in the first place - or both at the same time, as with Ivar the Terribles's Simpsons/Futurama dubs. "Der Schachcomputer Tiefblau und der Erfinder von Verliese und Drachen"... indeed. :)

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