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Artist: Howard Shore

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Howard Shore:

Anthology - The Paris Concerts

The dawn of the 21st century brought a seismic change for the composer when New Zealander Peter Jackson invited him to write the music for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, followed a decade later by The Hobbit. The blockbuster films introduced the wonders of Shore’s writing – here applied to storytelling on an epic scale – to audiences worldwide. “I honestly believe I managed to connect with Tolkien’s work and his love of nature, which I also share,” says Shore. “I wrote that music with my heart."

Another musical triptych was created in the spring of 2023 at the Maison de Radio France in Paris: a Howard Shore weekend presented three concerts aimed at defining the mysterious contours of the composer’s multifaceted output. Two concerts featuring the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France (one conducted by Ludwig Wicki, the other by Bastien Stil) bookended a third for reduced forces which focused more on experimental compositions. Pieces for 216 performers rubbed shoulders, for instance, with Catania (for solo piano), revealing the extent of Shore’s chameleon-like ability to switch between the most varied of genres and scales. The biggest thrill of the weekend was the chance it offered to rediscover scores of different styles and from different eras juxtaposed in the same program and given a coherent thread by being played by the same team of musicians.