Giles Smith writes: On a recent Tuesday, the composer Howard Shore left his hotel in London and climbed into a black Mercedes for the forty-five-minute drive to Watford, an unromantic suburb northwest of the city. There, in the Watford Colosseum, a municipal dance hall opposite a tanning salon, a sweetshop, and a pharmacy, Shore was working on the score for The Return of the King, the last movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a project that has occupied him for the past three years and will soon be completed. [More]