I recently secured tickets for Apocalyptica's upcoming show in 0Toronto. They are an interesting genre-crossing act featured in this week's Tuesday Tune-age.
In the mid-1990s, four cellists attending Finland's prestigious Sibelius Academy met frequently to perform Metallica covers. Their first studio album, Plays Metallica By Four Cellos (1996) consisted of cello arrangements of "Harvester of Sorrow", "Creeping Death", and "Master of Puppets" among others.
While hardly the first act to bring cellos into rock or heavy music, even as lead instruments, it's safe to say the vast majority of metal fans never heard string arrangements of guitar riffs and solos played by classically trained musicians before. As a long-haired adolescent who banged out covers of Iron Maiden tunes on the grand piano in between practicing scales and Kabalevsky pieces, when I first heard Apocalyptica's version of "Enter Sandman" I was both impressed and vindicated. With no drums, no distortion and no vocals (the vocal melody was taken up by one of the cellos), the quartet showed just how melodic thrash metal could be by stripping away its noisier adornments.
Arguably, Apocalyptica was an inspiration for the formation of Vitamin Records, a music label based around releasing dozens of albums of string quartet (and more recently, piano) arrangements of rock and pop music.
The quartet's second album, Inquisition Symphony (1998), contained more covers of Metallica and a few other metal acts, as well as three original compositions by bandleader Eicca Toppinen. This would carry over onto the third album, Cult (2000), which was almost all Toppinen original compositions, except for two Metallica covers and an interpretation of every heavy metaller's favourite classical piece, Edvard Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King". The group started using distortion and other effects for the first time.
Starting with the fourth album, Reflections (2003), Apocalyptica essentially settled on a sound of cellos (clean and distorted), adding a drumkit (Slayer's Dave Lombardo guesting on several studio tracks), and for some songs, guest vocalists including the Finnish frontmen of The Rasmus and HIM, Rammstein's Till Lindemann, Three Days Grace's Adam Gontier and Lacuna Coil's Cristina Scabbia.
Heavy metal musicians have drawn inspiration from classical music from the very beginnings of the genre. Less well-known in the popular understanding: serious composers have always been inspired by the popular and folk music of their day. Carl Orff's celebrated Carmina Burana is a cycle of arrangements of medieval drinking songs, while the hundreds of lieder composed by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and other German composers have their roots in medieval folk songs. It's not my intention to elevate these long-haired Finns to those heights (especially when history is the final arbiter of such things), but only to forestall a reflexive dismissal of their work. As more and more popular music sounds like it's all been done before, creative artists will plumb new wells for inspiration, even centuries-old material. If this helps bring older schools of music to the attention of new listeners, that can only be a good thing, right?
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