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The question is not why, but why has it taken so long? Putting heavy metal and classical together that is, as the Philharmonia are doing next week in their Forged in Sound: Heavy Metal Orchestrated gig, part of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival.
There’s more that connects metal and classical music than sets them apart. A love of volume, turning the noise up to 11? From Black Sabbath to Stravinsky, check. A worship of virtuosity, of speed, technique and orgiastic instrumental excess, from Vivaldi to Van Halen? Absolutely. An all-too easily parodied sense of grandiloquence, pseudo-seriousness and expressive pomp and circumstance? I give you Richard Wagner and Iron Maiden. An addiction to flamboyant spectacle, a PR-driven flirtation with the dark side to build the mythology of the music and the performers? That too.
Nineteenth-century violin superstar Paganini was rumoured to have struck a deal with Lucifer such was his virtuosity. The morality police of 1980s America imagined that satanism was being incited by teenagers who played metal records (remember the “parental advisory” stickers?)
It was in the mines of classical that the heavy metal guitar sound was truly forged, as Robert Walser’s compelling study, Running with the Devil, reveals. Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore modelled his solos on Vivaldi, Randy Rhoads needed Pachelbel to make Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz, and Van Halen called upon Rodolphe Kreutzer in Eruption, his epoch-making solo on his debut album. The 101 seconds of Eruption did as much to push electric guitar technique forward in the 1970s as any of the monsters of classical technique had done for their instruments in previous centuries.
As well as virtuosity, classical and heavy metal also share an obsession with technique, the transgressing of boundaries that previous generations had thought impossible to achieve – Van Halen’s technique of tapping, using the right hand above the left on the guitar neck, Liszt’s double octaves and feats of memorisation – and the search for faster, louder, more intense, more immersive levels of spectacle. Where classical led, metal has followed.
But there are frontiers that the Philharmonia aren’t yet crossing. You want more intensity, more speed, more extremity, sonic violence, blast beats, avant garde adventure and social consciousness? The answer to all of those in metal is Napalm Death. Imagine the grindcore band in collaboration with an industrially massive orchestra and death-metal growling choir: just think what would happen if Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism, their devastating 2020 record, the sublime equivalent of looking into the abyss and surviving, or From Enslavement to Obliteration, the guttural cry from the underworld of their second album, were orchestrally re-forged. The musical world would shake on its axis. Mind you, the Proms season is announced next week – there’s always a chance. Isn’t there?
Among the Royal Opera’s new season – announced yesterday – there’s an irresistible Wagnerian face-off. Can Evgeny Titov’s new staging of Wagner’s last music-drama, Parsifal, hit the same heights and draw the audiences that Barrie Kosky’s Götterdämmerung – the final instalment of his ongoing Ring cycle – looks set to do? The two productions will also pit Covent Garden’s two conductors against one another: the Royal Opera’s former music director, Antonio Pappano, is in the Ring corner; newly installed in the role, Jakub Hrůša takes on Parsifal.
The Ring is one of the best things the RBO has done in recent years, but I’m going to put my money on Parsifal, not least because Christian Gerhaher’s Amfortas, the tortured King of the Grail, might just be another of those performances for the ages, amid the opera’s ritual of blood-soaked redemption. And anyway – apart from the tragic demises of the mythical characters on stage – there are no winners or losers on the scorched earth of Wagner’s visions of apocalypse and renewal for all of us listening and watching.
This week, Tom has been listening to: Finnish composer Ida Moberg’s Sunrise Suite: a tone-poem from 1909 that dares a spareness as well as radiance and illumination; cosmic gossamer in orchestral sound.
