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But that's what's been happening when orchestras present the symphonic arrangement of Howard Shore's music for "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy. The Seattle Symphony, for one, announced one performance but had to add three more after demand outstripped supply.

Tonight's Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra concert was added after the original Friday and Saturday concerts sparked enormous interest in the chance to hear a live performance of the musical journeys through Middle Earth. The U.S. premiere of the pieces were held in March in Columbus, Ohio; it has been performed in Seattle, Atlanta and Philadelphia and will head to nine other cities after Pittsburgh through the end of the year. Pittsburgh's three concerts will be conducted by the composer, Howard Shore, and augmented by projections of Alan Lee's illustrations for J.R.R. Tolkien's novels. Lee also was conceptual designer for the films.

Extra events will surround the Heinz Hall concerts, including a pre-concert question-and-answer session with the composer at 6:30 each night, a post-concert reception with him for Gold Ticket holders, and even an "authentic" Middle Earth Dinner to benefit the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Fred Olaharski of Sheriden is the Tolkien enthusiast who brought the "Lord of the Rings" concert score to the Pittsburgh Symphony's attention. A boomer who is an independent printing product salesman and lifelong garage band drummer, he first read Tolkien's books in high school. He's such a huge fan that he braved December in Toronto for the first all-day showing of the trilogy, where demand occupied six of the screens in a multiplex theater.

But when he earlier discovered that the Columbus Symphony in Ohio was giving the American premiere of the symphony, he ordered tickets. Then, he says, he wondered, "How come them and not us?"

Olaharski wrote to the Pittsburgh Symphony in September asking if they knew about the "Lord of the Rings" Symphony and if they would bring it here. He was shocked when only two days later he received a reply from assistant artistic administrator Shelly Fuentes, writing that the symphony hadn't known about it and would look into it.

That's a better response than conductor John Mauceri received from other orchestras. "A year ago, nobody would play it," he says. "When I suggested it to people at the Ravinia Festival -- where the Chicago Symphony gives summer concerts -- they looked at me as though I was crazy."

Mauceri's advocacy for a Lord of the Rings Symphony began, he says, with urging the composer to preserve his music by putting it into concert form. Mauceri, who is music director of Pittsburgh Opera, takes a special interest in film music as a result of exploring the forgotten music of European composers who emigrated to America and worked in Hollywood.

After the two talked about form and details, Shore wrote the first two movements of the symphony. Mauceri conducted them at the Hollywood Bowl and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra two years ago. Now Mauceri and Shore split performances of the full six-movement symphony.

But Mauceri says Shore's music, unlike Wagner's "Ring music, evokes an incantational deep collective past," with strong Celtic sources. He also notes that the Lord of the Rings Symphony is unprecedented. There is no such score for "Star Wars," or for that matter "Gone With the Wind," "Ben Hur," "Titanic" or "Gladiator."

The fans flocking to Heinz Hall for "Lord of the Rings" are not limited to Western Pennsylvania. Olaharski and his wife will host a friend from Philadelphia, while others are coming from Michigan, New York and Massachusetts.

Some local Tolkien fans will be onstage, including symphony violist Richard Holland. When he attended High Mowing, a progressive high school in New Hampshire, the students "built the closest thing to the map of the whole Middle Earth. It took up a 40-foot by 60-foot wall. It took a year building, then a year playing it out. We never did get it right, though we thought we did and had a ball."

Holland was cautious before seeing the first film, "The Fellowship of the Ring." "For me, the worst thing I can do is see a movie after I've read the book. It's a sure letdown. In this case, the film is phenomenal. They beat my imagination every which way. The cast speaks to how wonderfully descriptive Tolkien's writing was. All the characters on film look exactly like what I saw when I read the books. The music fits beautifully in the movie."

There has been much discussion in fan chatrooms about the cinematic adaptation. Olaharski, whose screen name, Fredo, plays off the name of the Hobbit hero Frodo, says he finds the battle scenes in the second and third films disproportionately long, among other issues.

Olaharski also feels the later films don't do justice to the bonds between Frodo and his friend Sam, and don't convey the inner challenges Frodo faces in bring the evil master ring back to where it was forged in order to destroy it.

"It all clicked for me when I was reading Tolkien's letters a few year ago and discovered he was a devout Catholic. I'm Catholic, too," he says. "Frodo comes to understand slowly but surely what he's involved with. Tolkien was writing that you're called upon to do things that are bigger than you. It's up to you to manage them as well as you can, to carry your cross."

Olaharski says that when he saw "The Fellowship of the Ring," he couldn't get the music out of his head. "I was totally grabbed by the themes, but had reservations about the adaptation of the novel. I went back, of course, and have gotten hooked on the film, but it was the music that got me first."

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