Review | Heavy metal music meets orchestral sound in Bright & Black at Hong Kong Arts Festival, with mixed results
- Metalhead composers writing music of orchestral scope is not as strange as it might sound, and Black Sea Philharmonic quickly established a consistent mood
- The tracks all came from recent album Bright & Black, and moves are afoot to release a video game based on it. That might give this music its rightful home
Sceptics who think that symphony orchestras and heavy metal bands occupy incompatible realms need only consider Lauri Porra.
The great-grandson of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, Porra has written a fair amount of his own music – mostly for television and film, with an occasional dip into the orchestra world – but at home, he is much more famous as the bassist for the power metal band Stratovarius.
Eicca Toppinen may not have quite so distinguished a lineage – none of his ancestors has ever appeared on the nation’s currency – but musically his classical and metal credentials speak for themselves.
A former cellist with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the contemporary chamber orchestra Avanti!, Toppinen is also a composer and songwriter as well as co-founder of Apocalyptica, an all-cello ensemble that started as a Metallica cover band in the mid-1990s before evolving into a full-blown rock group in its own right (and becoming the first Finnish band to top the US charts).
All of which made Toppinen the perfect frontman for “Bright and Black”, a programme presented by the Hong Kong Arts Festival bringing together the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, a multinational ensemble comprising musicians from various Nordic countries, with a roster of Scandinavian metalheads writing music of genuinely symphonic scope.
