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Composer Howard Shore's magnificent, appropriately epic work on director Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy garnered the Canadian composer three Academy awards, and rightly so. When Jackson decided to tackle The Hobbit in 2012, it took little convincing to bring Shore back to Middle Earth along with him, and the resulting Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first of three installments, dutifully reflected the lighter tone of the pre-Fellowship film while paying homage to the darker adventures that follow. For The Desolation of Smaug, Shore honed the themes introduced in An Unexpected Journey and amped up the darkness and bombast, introducing a memorable new cue to accompany the arrival of the film's scaly antagonist. ~ James Christopher Monger
