A Lament for the Third Age.
Eat your heart out, Glenn Yarbrough. Soundtrack.Net posts their review of the Return of the King score, complete with 30 second clips from each song. For the third time in a row, it sounds like Howard Shore hit it out of the park...I don't think you can overestimate how much he's improved these films with his work, particularly after you consider the pedestrian and distracting score of the new Matrix movies. If you've never read the trilogy and don't know how it all ends, I wouldn't click through. But if you have...some of these snippets are really beautiful and tantalizing ("Hope and Memory" and "Twilight and Shadow," for example), and none more so than "The End of all Things" and "The Grey Havens." The Annie Lennox song that closes the film isn't exactly what I was expecting, to be honest, but I can see it growing on me.
It just keeps getting better and better.... until that godawful song at the end.
Actually, it's not as bad as it sounds. TORN has posted a link to the full Annie Lennox song (streaming), and the Soundtrack.net excerpt is the loudest, most shrill part. The song's actually much quieter and folky.