The score was performed by a 102-piece of the London Session Orchestra at AIR Lyndhurst Studios and Abbey Road Studios in London with orchestrations provided by Williams, Alexander Courage, Conrad Pope, John Neufeld, Eddie Karam, Pete Anthony, Benjamin Wallfisch and Larry Rench. It entered the Billboard 200 at No. 48 and also charted at No. 2 on the Top Soundtracks Chart.[3] In UK, the album charted at number 19. In 2018, the soundtrack was released by La-La-Land Records as a 3-Disc CD set encompassing the complete score of the film as part of a limited edition box set featuring the scores for the first three Harry Potter films.
"Hedwig's Theme" is the leitmotif for the film series.[4] Often labelled as the series's main theme, it first appeared in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in the track "Prologue". A concert arrangement of the same name is included in the end credits. "Hedwig's Theme" has been interpolated in the fourth through eighth Harry Potter film scores, including in those by Patrick Doyle, Nicholas Hooper, and Alexandre Desplat and the spin-off Fantastic Beasts scores by James Newton Howard. It also appears in the scores to the last four Harry Potter video games, all composed by James Hannigan. "Hedwig's Theme" has achieved significant pop culture status, being featured as ring tones, trailer music, and other forms of multimedia.
Whilst the score received mostly positive reviews from outlets such as AllMusic and Filmtracks, some reviewers were not impressed; USA Today reviewer Claudia Puig stated the "overly insistent score lacks subtlety and bludgeons us with crescendos."[5] Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter deemed the score "a great clanging, banging music box that simply will not shut up."[6]