Danse Macabre

Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 2 is, by any standards, an outright winner and deserves to be much better known. Here, it’s one of two substantial works flanking a rambunctious account of Danse macabre.

The music on La Danse Macabre is interesting enough, including death and black metal elements in small doses alongside operatic male and female singing and keyboard relient melodies. Imagine a bit of Blind Guardian, an element of Leaves' Eyes, and a tiny bit of Nightwish and you'll be headed in the right direction…

Esperanto is a language invented in 1887 by Zamenhof, who combined bits of various Romance language to make what he hoped would become a vehicle of universal communication. The Belgo-English band of the same name at the beginning of the 70s had a short but intense career and produced an extremely varied musical repertoire thanks to the many different nationalities, origins and outlooks of its members…

La Grande Danse Macabre is the seventh studio album by Swedish black metal band Marduk. It was recorded and mixed at The Abyss in December 2000 and released on March 5, 2001, by Regain Records. La Grande Danse Macabre is the last Marduk album with Fredrik Andersson on drums. On La Grande Danse Macabre, the theme is death. The lyrical themes are primarily reflective of this, with litterings present of the Satanic themes on which the band initially based themselves. The band's previous albums had been themed on blood (Nightwing) and war (Panzer Division Marduk), forming a trilogy of "Blood, War and Death", Marduk's vision of what black metal is.

Kent Nagano's 2016 collection of supernatural-themed tone poems brings together three orchestral classics and three less frequently programmed pieces. Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Modest Mussorgsky's A Night on the Bare Mountain are famous from their use in Walt Disney's Fantasia, and Camille Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre has become standard fare for Hallowe'en concerts. However, Antonín Dvorák's The Noonday Witch, Mily Balakirev's Tamara, and Charles Ives' Hallowe'en are likely unfamiliar to most listeners.

This Belgo-English band of the same name at the beginning of the 70s had a short but intense career and produced an extremely varied musical repertoire thanks to the many different nationalities, origins and outlooks of its members.
"Danse Macabre" (1974) is a natural evolution from the first album "Esperanto Rock Orchestra" (1973). The dramatic theme running though this second album reflects all aspects of Esperanto and shows a willingness to look for a definitive approach to contemporary music. Much of this direction has come from Peter Sinfield, who has produced this album following work with King Crimson, ELP and PFM and his influence can be clearly heard throughout.