The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was released on November 25, 2003. It was composed, orchestrated, and conducted by Howard Shore, and performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Voices, and the London Oratory School Schola. The limited edition contains a bonus DVD with the track “Use Well the Days” by Annie Lennox, song texts, photo gallery, and the LOTR trilogy supertrailer.

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The score to Return of the King is the most expansive of the three: containing over four hours of finalized music, scoring virtually the entire film length. It also musters the biggest staged forces, with sections calling for eight trumpets and a similar increase in the rest of the brass section, two timpanists, a mixed choir of 85 with additional singers for all-male and all-female parts, over fifty in the boy choir, various vocal soloists including soprano Renee Fleming and boy soprano Ben Del Maestro, and the full bands of celtic and eastern instruments returning from the first score. The score even uses a double fiddle, an instrument invented and crafted specifically for one scene in the film. Shore also scored the trailer for the film, which would eventually be released with various alternate takes in the Rarities archive. In 2006, Reprise Records released a multi-disc set for the film, titled The Complete Recordings. These contain the entire score for the extended versions of the film on CD, along with an additional DVD-Audio disc that offers 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround mixes of the soundtrack. The album also featured extensive liner notes by music journalist Doug Adams which reviews all of the tracks and provides information about the process of composing and recording the score, as well as a detailed list of all musical instruments, people and organizations involved. The cover artwork uses the film series’ logo and an inscription in Tolkien’s tengwar letters, over a background that depicts a map of Gondor in dark green.

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