Heavy metal's first orchestra collaboration left its guitarist feeling looked down on
In 1969 Deep Purple played a 50-minute piece with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, an early fusion of rock band and symphony. Guitarist Richie Blackmore later called the orchestra condescending and the stage show a calamity. Decades on, blending metal with strings, choirs and sopranos had grown into a whole subgenre.
Symphonic metal borrows from classical music in several ways: real orchestral instruments, choirs, sometimes an entire orchestra, keyboards imitating one, or simply orchestral ways of structuring a song. The Deep Purple concerto was written entirely by Jon Lord, the band's keyboard player and a pianist trained in the classical and baroque repertoire from boyhood, with Malcolm Arnold conducting. Black Sabbath added strings to Spiral Architect in 1973, and King Crimson's Robert Fripp drew on Bartók and Stravinsky alongside Jimi Hendrix.
In the 1980s Celtic Frost tried out woodwinds, horns and choral voices on To Mega Therion and Into the Pandemonium. Believer's Dies Irae, from the 1990 album Sanity Obscure, is cited as an early prototype; writer Jeff Wagner called it a creative watershed. The Swedish band Therion even took its name from that Celtic Frost record. In 1992 the Dutch group The Gathering released one of the first albums to pair death-metal growls with synthesizer leads and a female soprano.
The keyboard or orchestra usually does the heavy lifting, while guitars, bass and drums may play comparatively plain parts. Songs lean atmospheric yet brighter than much metal, so even gloomy subjects often get major-key fanfares. Fantasy and mythology dominate the lyrics, and concept albums styled after operas or epic poems turn up regularly. A soprano frequently leads, and bands with operatic singers are sometimes labelled opera metal.
Prominent names include Nightwish from Finland, Rhapsody of Fire from Italy, Epica and Within Temptation from the Netherlands, Dimmu Borgir from Norway and America's Trans-Siberian Orchestra, many drawing on film scores and some led by classically trained composers. Offshoots mix the approach with black metal, as Cradle of Filth and Emperor did, or with the upbeat fantasy of power metal.
Source: Symphonic metal
