Andreas Helm

Metal Allegiance burst onto the scene in 2015 with one of the strongest debut metal albums in years. It’s even more impressive when you consider that Metal Allegiance are a collaboration, a metal super-group comprised of some of the busiest and most decorated musicians in the genre. David Ellefson (MEGADETH), Alex Skolnick (TESTAMENT), Mike Portnoy (SONS OF APOLLO, ex-DREAM THEATER, et al.) and Mark Menghi comprise the core four, and are joined by a laundry list of metal legends both new and old…

With its Chief Conductor Toshiyuki Kamioka at the helm, the Copenhagen Philharmonic performs three of Richard Strauss’s most sparkling scores: the Oboe Concerto, with soloist Andreas Fosdal, the First Horn Concerto, played by Jakob Keiding, and the suite from Der Bürger als Edelmann. Strauss’s Oboe Concerto is in three seamless movements: a pastoral opening with ornate oboe lines leads into a radiant slow movement and virtuoso finale. Strauss’s famous horn-playing father inspired his First Horn Concerto, which reveals his evident relish for the horn’s uninhibited, bucolic character as it cuts through the orchestral colours. Strauss’s music for Der Bürger als Edelmann (based on the 17th-century Molière-Lully collaboration Le bourgeois gentilhomme) is an early instance of neoclassicism, originally composed to be performed immediately before his opera Ariadne auf Naxos. The result is a quintessentially Straussian confection, combining lyricism and good humour.

Empyrium is a German symphonic folk/doom metal and (later) neofolk/dark folk band.The band draws inspiration from nature as some of the album titles reveal. Consequently, Empyrium are often referred to as a dark folk or apocalyptic folk band, expressing in their music (most conspicuously in the last two albums) sentiments akin to those expressed by some other 'legislators' of the genre, as Forseti, Orplid, and Ulver (Kveldssanger). Connoisseurs of dark folk will mention that many of Empyrium's compositions are true representatives of the genre, as, for instance, Dying Brokenhearted, The Shepherd and the Maiden Ghost ("Where At Night…"), Heimwärts, Waldpoesie, Die Schwäne im Schilf ("Weiland"). Intricately woven and always impregnated with an exquisite wistfulness or profound, remorseful sadness (Dying Brokenhearted), these compositions may be regarded as a manifesto of the dark-folkloristic gloomy and pantheistic Weltanschauung. The lyrics are mostly in English, though in Weiland only German is performed. Like the Norwegian black metal band Burzum, Empyrium also used Theodor Kittelsen's drawing on one of their album covers (Where at Night the Wood Grouse Plays).