From clips to riffs and Vivaldi to Van Halen, classic and heavy metal are a natural pairing | classical music

TThe question is not why, but why did it take so long? Heavy metal and classical music are being brought together, as the Philharmonia will do next week at the Forged in Sound: Heavy Metal Orchestrated concert, part of the Multititudes festival at the Southbank Centre.

There is more that connects metal and classical music than separates them. Love the volume, turn the noise up to 11? From Black Sabbath to Stravinsky, check. The worship of virtuosity, speed, technique and instrumental extravagance, from Vivaldi to Van Halen? definitely. An easily mocking sense of eloquence, false seriousness, pomp and circumstance? Introducing Richard Wagner and Iron Maiden. Addicted to the dazzling spectacle, flirting with the dark side through PR to build music legends and performers? This too.

The 19th century violin star Paganini was rumored to have made a deal with Lucifer that was his virtuosity. America’s morality police in the 1980s imagined that teenagers playing metal records were inciting Satanism (remember the “Parental Advice” posters?)

It is in the mines of classical music that the heavy metal guitar sound was truly created, as Robert Walser’s compelling study, Running with the Devil, reveals. Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore modeled his solos on Vivaldi, Randy Rhoads needed Pachelbel to make Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz, and Van Halen summoned Rudolf Kreutzer on Eruption, his epoch-making solo debut album. 101 Seconds of Eruption pushed electric guitar technology forward in the 1970s as much as any of the classic techno monsters did for their instruments in previous centuries..

In addition to technical prowess, classic metal and heavy metal also share an obsession with technique, pushing boundaries that previous generations thought impossible to achieve – Van Halen’s style of percussion, using the right hand over the left on the guitar neck, Liszt’s double octaves and feats of memorization – and the search for faster, louder, more intense and more immersive spectacle levels. Where classics led, metal followed.

But there are borders that no orchestra has yet crossed. Want more intensity, more speed, more extreme, sonic violence, blast beats, avant-garde adventure, and social consciousness? The answer to all those in metal is napalm death. Imagine a grindcore band collaborating with a huge industrial orchestra and a roaring metal chorus: just think what would happen if Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism, their devastating 2020 record and the brilliant equivalent of looking into the abyss and surviving, or From Enslavement to Obliteration, the guttural scream from the underworld of their second album, were reconfigured in orchestral form. The musical world will shake on its axis. Pay attention, party season will be announced next week – there’s always a chance. Isn’t there?

AAmong the Royal Opera’s new season – announced yesterday – is an irresistible Wagnerian encounter. Can Evgeny Titov’s new staging of Wagner’s last musical drama, Parsifal, reach the same heights and enthrall audiences as Barry Koski’s Götterdämmerung — the final installment of the ongoing Ring cycle — seems poised to do? The two productions will also pit two Covent Garden conductors against each other: the former music director of the Royal Opera, Antonio Pappano, is in the round corner; Newly appointed to the role is Jakub Hrůša, who plays Parsifal.

The Ring is one of the best things RBO has done in recent years, but I’d put my money on Parsifal, not least because Christian Gerhaher’s Amfortas, the tortured Grail King, may be just another one of those performances for the ages, amid the operatic ritual of blood-soaked redemption. In any case – apart from the tragic demise of the legendary figures on stage – there are no winners or losers in the scorched earth of Wagner’s visions of apocalypse and renewal for all of us listening and watching.

This week, Tom was listening to: “Sunrise Suite” by Finnish composer Ida Moberg: a tone poem from 1909 that dares to spare, to brighten, to illuminate; The cosmic thread in orchestral sound.