the thirtyfirst session actually consists of three videos, excerpts of the concept album yeah! yeah! die! die! a death metal symphony in deep c by waltari. this album combines mainly classic with death metal, and also a lot of other styles. it’s almost one hour of music. here are three excerpts.

the first part is mainly death metal vs. classic.

the lyrics for this part can be found here.

the second part is mostly techno with classic and metal.

the lyrics for this part can be found here.

the third part is mostly rap with classic and metal.

the lyrics for this part can be found here.

i like it because… it is such a creative, great blend of various music styles into one big symphony.

while listening to a mike oldfield collection, i came across his cover of the william tell overture, a well-known classical piece by gioachino rossini. since i really like this song, you can watch it here, featuring many copies of mike:

if you want, you can listen to rossini’s piece on youtube.

just found something very cool on blabbermouth: on a guitar workshop, alexi laiho and roope latvala from the finnish melodic death metallers children of bodom played vivaldi on their guitars! more precisely: summer: presto (op. 4, concerto no. 2, mvt. 3) from the four seasons. check it out:

besides apocalyptica, there’s another creat classic/metal crossover to mention, lingua mortis by rage and the symphonic orchestra prague. this is not simply a version of some songs with an orchestra in the background (that’s more common, see, for example, metallica‘s s&m and dream theater‘s score), but a complete rewrite of several older rage songs for orchestra together with the usual rage instruments. my first contact with this really excellent piece of music was, again, the sampler dark winter nights, which contained the alive but dead.
this year, rage was on tour with the lingua mortis orchestra, playing in Київ, Санкт-Петербург, Москва, vizovice and, finally, at the wacken open air. originally, they were supposed to also play at the metal dayz in pratteln, but as these were cancelled, i had no chance to see them… :-(

yesterday i attended apocalyptica‘s concert in zurich. supported by the youngsters from sturm und drang, which were acting pretty professional, both from their playing skills, and their stage performance. that was pretty nice, though not exactly the kind of music i like to listen to.
then, after half an hour of sturm and drang and another half an hour of stage rebuilding and waiting, apocalyptica started off with an (as usual) great atmospheric intro. well. the show was simply great. though, i’m still not convinced that drums fit in there; though some songs a great with drums, most i would prefer to hear most songs without drums, or at least with less audible drums. fortunately they played some songs without, but just a very few… at least, they didn’t started to take a vocalist along their tour…
besides these things, though, the concert was really, really great! besides playing songs from the current album, worlds collide, they also played many older songs and also some metallica covers, and edvard griegs in the hall of the mountain king, one of my very favorite songs, declared by apocalyptica to be a great piece of norwegian black metal (i think they said that on their previous concert here in zurich, around two years ago).
after two encores, they finally left the stage, leaving back a thrilled and enthusiastic crowd.