Something for Thursday

An interesting thing happened in the 2004 and the 2005 Academy awards: the first year, the Oscar for Best Original Score went to Howard Shore for his enormously epic score for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, a score which featured huge orchestral and choral forces over three-plus hours of music. The next year, Oscar recognized what might be the polar opposite of Shore's work, a score with a delicate, almost impressionistic, chamber music-like sound. And both are among my very favorite filmscores of the last ten years. Here are several selections from Jan AP Kaczmarek's Finding Neverland.