Daylight Surprise Chef

After ten years from their last release "A Gate Trough The Past", which was their debut album. HOLY KNIGHTS are back with an amazing new album, which features nine tracks of pure epic power metal!!!

New age music and ancient shrines seem to work well together, as evidenced by top-selling concert CDs and videos (now DVDs) by Keiko Matsui and Yanni over the years. Kitaro's idea for a greatest-hits collection performed at the sacred Yakushiji Temple in Nara, the ancient Japanese capitol, is more about beauty and intimacy than sheer spectacle, although it would be fun to imagine this dramatic presentation in its native setting. The music on this double disc was taken from three live concerts in the summer of 2001, the first concerts ever presented in the temple proper. Not that you need the background to be swept away into the dreamy mysticism that defines Kitaro's twist on the universe, but this temple is the resting place of the ashes of Genjo Sanzo, the seventh century monk who walked the Silk Road from Japan to India, returning from India with the sacred texts that introduced Buddhism into China and Japan.

The Surprise Symphony was, before the Mozart craze of the early 1990s, the most famous piece of classical music after Beethoven's Fifth, and if it gets into some feature film it could well regain it's former position. It says something for Haydn's ability to write consistently interesting and witty music that the most popular, "named" part in a symphony (this one included) is likely to be the slow movement. In other words, Haydn is often at his most entertaining just when other composers are putting you to sleep. Symphony No. 93 also has a surprise in its slow movement–a highly scatological comment from the bassoon at the very end, followed by what can only be described as orchestral laughter.