This must be one of the more unusual CD re-releases of an older score. Leonard Rosenman’s lengthy, hard working score for LORD OF THE RINGS has been lavishly reproduced, transfigured, on CD. Thirteen years have elapsed since the score first made its appearance on a double album. As the composer notes in his rather self-serving liner notes, the audio quality wasn't too hot.

Leonard Rosenman pounced on film scoring like a roaring lion, savaging the concept of Late Romanticism which had hitherto grazed happily across the Hollywood musical pastures. Invited to compose the music for EAST OF EDEN in 1955, Rosenman was initially insistent that the film be scored throughout with atonal music – a mode of composition almost totally alien to an industry which by now had an historical investment in providing modal melodic invention, not only as an attractive means of scoring films, but also as a way of promoting the movies themselves - via winning themes issued on commercial discs. Rosenman was persuaded to temper his ambitions, and EAST OF EDEN emerged with a score where serial composition was only utilised in part - to illustrate the complexity of the tale’s more youthful characters - but nevertheless eyebrows were raised, feathers were ruffled, and batons were twitching. Rosenman had heralded his own entrance into Hollywood with what was essentially "new" music.