The CD by the military band
Koninklijke Militaire Kapel helped give the symphony worldwide acclaim. In 1989 it won the
Sudler Composition Award. It has been recorded by several orchestras. An orchestral version of the piece, orchestrated by
Henk de Vlieger, was premiered and recorded in 2001 by the
London Symphony Orchestra to coincide with the release of the 2001 film,
The Fellowship of the Ring. The musicologist Estelle Jorgensen wrote that while the symphony has a programmatic aspect, it is "also formally interesting as sheer instrumental sound." The Tolkien scholar
David Bratman noted in 2010 that the symphony had attracted four recordings. He commented that though it was Dutch, it was in the tradition of British concert band and symphonic composers like
Malcolm Arnold and
Gustav Holst. He stated, too, that like another symphony based on
The Lord of the Rings, the Finnish composer
Aulis Sallinen's 1996 Symphony No. 7
The Dreams of Gandalf, it mainly aims not to tell the story but to create a mood. Thus, three of the movements introduce characters – Gandalf, Gollum, and (the finale) the Hobbits. The second movement, Bratman wrote, presents the character of a place, the Elvish wood of
Lothlórien, "which, like everyone from
Bo Hansson to
Enya, de Meij seems to hear as steamy." In 2001, Paul Lavender wrote a shorter, Grade III variation of the symphony, condensing three of de Meij's five movements into a concert version. It was premiered at the 2001
Midwest Clinic by the
VanderCook College of Music, directed by De Meij. ==Recordings==