Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra concludes another spectacular Pops season with a one of a kind evening: an audience with the Academy Award-winning composer Howard Shore. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra celebrates the outstanding career and achievements of a true icon, with performances of his best known scores and live interviews by acclaimed film music writer Jon Burlingame, with the composer from the stage. Audiences will thrill to the music from his legendary scores to The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the world premiere of music from The Hobbit with scores from his films: The Aviator, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Silence of the Lambs, Hugo, and many more.

This is an epic evening filled with amazing music and the composer’s own insights. A unique experience not to be missed!

June 24 at 8:00 pm
June 25 at 8:00 pm
June 26 at 2:30 pm

Buy Tickets: 412-392-4900

http://www.pittsburghsymphony.org/Shore

20 April Wednesday - 19:00 

For the first time on the stage of the State Kremlin Palace - Lord of the Rings. Concert. 250 people on the stage, symphonic orchestra and 2 choirs! The famous composer and conductor Howard Shore together with the director Peter Jackson have created a truly unique show – Lord of the Rings Concert, based on the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. The soundtrack to the movie brought the composer three Oscars, four Grammies and three Gold Globes.

The Tales of the Middle-earth is a chronicle of the Great war for the Ring, the war that lasted for thousands of years. The one who owned the Ring, received the power over all live creatures, but was obliged to serve the evil. The quiet village where hobbits live. The wizard Gandalf, having come to the 111th birthday of his old friend Bilbo Baggins, starts conversation about a ring that Bilbo found many years ago. This ring belonged once to the dark master of the Middle-earth Sauron, and it gives great power to its owner. Now Sauron wants to return the power over the Middle-earth. Bilbo gives the found ring to his nephew Frodo who tries to learn to cope with that terrible power, which the ring gives …

Every action is followed by music! The charming, loud, quiet, nervous, intense melody accompanies every character. The large-scale show with all the unexpected turns is developing on the stage and the main character is music. It takes the spectator on the tracks of the mysterious world, it reveals secrets, it acquaints us with characters of the trilogy. Thanks to virtuosity of the composer, the listener will plunge into another world, the world of adventures, friendship, danger and even of darkness and evil. 250 people on the stage – the Symphonic orchestra and 2 choirs help to immerse into the world of fantastic travel and to wander the footpaths of other worlds.

The show participants: Symphonic orchestra of Moscow "Russkaya Philormoniya", the Mixed choir of the Academy of choral art of V. S. Popov, the State chorus of the Moscow regional philharmonic hall, Chorus of boys of the choral school of A.V. Sveshnikov.

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THE LORD OF THE RINGS: FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

Composer Howard Shore brings J.R.R. Tolkien's literary imagination to vivid life with his Academy®- and Grammy® Award-winning score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Shore's music expresses Peter Jackson's film as an immense symphonic work—a uniquely developed vision drawn from centuries of stylistic tendencies.

The music of The Lord of the Rings is counted among film music's most complex and comprehensive works. This unique performance sets the score to the film, but allows the music to bear the narrative weight, creating a wholly new and dramatic live concert experience.

Shore's score not only captures Fellowship's sweeping emotion, thrilling vistas and grand journeys, but also echoes the very construction of Tolkien's Middle-earth. Styles, instruments and performers collected from around the world provide each of Tolkien's cultures with a unique musical imprint. The rural and simple hobbits are rooted in a dulcet weave of Celtic tones. The mystical Elves merit ethereal Eastern colors. The Dwarves, Tolkien's abrasive stonecutters, receive columns of parallel harmonies and a rough, guttural male chorus. The industrialized hordes of Orcs claim Shore's most violent and percussive sounds, including Japanese taiko drums, metal bell plates and chains beaten upon piano wires, while the world of Men, flawed yet noble heirs of Middle-earth, is introduced with stern and searching brass figures. In operatic fashion, these musical worlds commingle, sometimes combining forces for a culminated power, other times violently clashing…and always bending to the will of the One Ring and its own ominous family of themes.

The music's vast scope calls for symphony orchestra, mixed chorus, boys chorus and instrumental and vocal soloists singing in the Tolkien-crafted languages Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdul, Adûnaic, Black Speech, as well as English. Original folk songs stand alongside diatonic hymns, knots of polyphony, complex tone clusters and seething, dissonant aleatoric passages. It is purposeful, knowing writing, as contained in execution as it is far-reaching in influence; for within this broad framework resides a remarkably concise musical vision. Shore's writing assumes an earthy, grounded tone built on sturdy orchestral structures and a sense of line that is at once fluid yet stripped of frivolous ornamentation. 

Orchestra: Filarmonia İstanbul 
Conductor: Ludwig Wicki 
Soprano: Kaitlyn Lusk
Boys Choir: İstanbul Senfoni Çocuk Korosu 
Boys Choir Masters: Gökçen Koray & Seval Irmak
Adult Choir: Rezonans Senfonik Koro
Adult Choir Master: Burak Onur Erdem

Click HERE for info and tickets.

From the soundworlds that shaped almost every one of David Cronenberg’s films to the fantasy thundering of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, ranging through the musical punctuation of thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme) and Seven (David Fincher), the pursuit of sparks of rock music in High Fidelity (Steven Frears) or the accompaniment to the hypnoses and bizarre hiccups of Ed Wood (Tim Burton), without forgetting all those incursions into genres that arose out of the collaboration with Martin Scorsese, from the mechanical tick-tock of black comedy (After Hours) to the epic score of The Aviator to the fantastical sighs of Hugo… These are just some of the greatest examples – among the many available – of how a soundtrack can never be reduced to a secondary filmic element, to a side dish, when it has been scored with the creative touch of a composer like Howard Shore. He has the rare gift of being able to insert the music directly into that process of world-building that lies at the base of a film. And it is because of this gift, put to the service of a long series of great directors, that the Festival del film Locarno is paying tribute to the great Canadian composer and conductor. 

This is the latest continuation of a journey that Locarno is dedicating to those figures who have shaped the history of cinema with their insight and skill. After the tributes to the special effects of Douglas Trumbull (2013), Mr Steadicam® Garrett Brown (2014) and sound designer and editor Walter Murch, the upcoming 69th edition will turn the spotlight on Howard Shore. Born in Toronto in 1946, his musical career has not been limited to the movies, though it is at the cinema that it has found its maximum resonance. This is clear not just from the welcome recognition represented by a total of three Oscars (Best Original Score in 2002 for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and in 2004 for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, when he also won the award for Best Original Song for Into the West, performed by Annie Lennox). What should be noted most of all is the significance and impact his compositions have had on the invention of the most diverse auteurial universes, with that versatility that can move musical horizons in order to combine them with the image in a way that is always stimulating and never unambiguous. And if there was ever need of more examples, we can go back to where we started from: the substantial filmography of David Cronenberg, with whom Shore began working back in 1979, with the science-fiction horror The Brood. The dystopian future ruled by television violence in Videodrome (1983) would never have found its anguished density without the sinister and metallic reverberations that infect its soundtrack. The same can be said for the horror-like suspense that musically accompanies the bodily transformations of a scientist into an insect in The Fly (1986). Cinematographic voyages that merge with Ornette Coleman’s saxophone as they delve into the hallucinated mental explorations of Naked Lunch (1991), or veer towards the disturbing electric cords of a guitar that creates the sound landscape of the erotic collisions between cars and bodies in Crash (1996). And so on, up to the more noir and dramatic styles of Cronenberg’s most recent productions (Eastern Promises, Cosmopolis, Maps to the Stars), also characterized by Shore’s music, because the ear can also lead us to the edges of other types of mental abyss. As always for Shore, he discards any kind of didactic shortcut, instead setting himself the task of sculpting, note by note, the invisible heart of the world in which everything takes place. 

Lorenzo Buccella