Orion Channeling

'Weiss used the word “presentiment“ in his notes and it is an excellent one for the mood his playing captures. The great pity is that we now have wait for the next instalment to see where Weiss’ imagination takes us next on the downward curve.’

Orion performs Progressive rock sung in French, with some folk influences, close to French groups such as Mona Lisa or Atoll. One may also think of anglo-saxon bands such as Gryphon, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Yes or Gentle Giant. Orion lies somewhere between these groups, with its own style. Recorded in the year 1979, "La Nature Vit, L'Homme Lui Critique…" is a very sought-after collector, reissued by Musea with a new cover art by Jean-Jacques Killan and, as a bonus, the two titles from the band's single. Orion was back with a second album entitled "Mémoires Du Temps". Originally planned for the beginning of the Eighties, this second effort had to wait about thirty-three years to eventually see the light of day…

Let's call a spade a spade. Orion is an Elvis impersonator. No more, no less. That he's a good Elvis impersonator is important, since if he wasn't, Sun probably wouldn't have tried to promote his recordings as if they were genuine Elvis material, even going to the extremes of overdubbing Orion's voices on recordings by such Sun stalwarts as Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. This doesn't make him any better, but it sure makes him fascinating, particularly because he is gifted at mimicry and these are pretty good evocations of Elvis at his peak…

Orion the Hunter was a 1980s rock combo and offshoot of the popular band Boston. It featured former Boston members Barry Goudreau on guitars and Brad Delp on backing vocals, as well as future Boston lead vocalist Fran Cosmo. The band was originally known as simply "Orion", but the name was changed to "Orion the Hunter" in deference to pressure from Orion Pictures. The group's self-titled album in 1984 on Portrait/CBS Records, which yielded a hit single "So You Ran," featured the sky-high vocals which prompted Cosmo's entrance to Boston in the early 1990s. Orion the Hunter charted at #57 on Billboard's Top 200 Albums chart after its debut on May 9, 1984. "So You Ran" made the Top Ten on rock radio and was a mid-chart hit on mainstream pop radio. Orion the Hunter featured Bruce Smith on bass and ex-Heart drummer Michael DeRosier. The album also included Brad Delp, former lead singer of Boston, who co-wrote four songs and sang background vocals on numerous tracks. Delp's vocals are especially noticeable on the ballad "Joanne" which he co-wrote with lead singer Fran Cosmo.

This new studio recording contains three works for piano and orchestra that virtuoso pianist Orion Weiss and conductor Leon Botstein first performed in concert at the Bard Music Festival. Together, the three works span almost a century of musical Romanticism and are as different from one another as the generations they represent. In each piece, the virtuoso genre becomes a means by which the composer responds to a specific source of inspiration – in the first case (Korngold), a performer and family friend who had suffered a horrendous tragedy, in the second (Rimsky-Korsakov), a venerated old master, and in the third (Chopin) a melody from a beloved opera.

Orion performs Progressive rock sung in French, including folk influences, in the vein of Seventies French groups such as Mona Lisa or Atoll. One may also think of anglo-saxon bands such as Gryphon, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Yes or Gentle Giant. Orion lies somewhere between these groups, with its own style.
"Le Survivant" (2017) deals with pollution, global warming, lobbies ruling the world and prevailing economic interests. Here's a powerful concept-album, driven by political lyrics, faithful to the ecological and militant spirit that was already in the air for the first opus…