EPICA: 'Classical Conspiracy' Choir Rehearsal Video Footage Posted Online

Dutch symphonic metallers EPICA will take part in a special concert dubbed "Classical Conspiracy" on June 14 at the Miskolc International Opera Festival in Hungary. The band will perform classical pieces from Mozart, Dvorak, Verdi, Orff, Prokofiev, Grieg, Vivaldi as well as symphonic versions of its own songs.

According to a posting on EPICA's web site, the Choir of Miskolc National Theatre has already started the rehearsals and posted some videos online. Watch the first clip below.

EPICA keyboardist Coen Janssen recently stated about the process of scoring the orchestra and the choir, "Maybe this sounds a bit disappointing, but scoring the orchestra and choir isn't that much of a creative proces. You just try to translate parts that have already been written into sheet music so that other people can play it. But I'll try to explain as much as possible. Because we make orchestral music, it is necessary to have an orchestra on our songs. However recording a real orchestra has been too expensive up untill now. Therefore we mainly use MIDI and samples. In the studio we had Miro (one of our producers) doing our orchestrations. He knows best how to do it and he has all the new and good-sounding sample libraries which makes the best result in the end. We already had those MIDI files so that's where the work starts. First of all, you have to quantize the tracks. Samples can react different which each instrument which results in unreadable scores, so you have to "straighten" the notes which is called quantizing. After that I send the quantized songs (with all tracks) to Oliver Palotai. He does the real work. He will put all the tracks to sheet music and he will add the dynamics and all other information it needs. When he is done, he sends it to Miskolc and they print it out. For the choirs this almost works the same. Because we already recorded the choirs live, we have all the scores already. However, sometimes I play some sampled choirs during the live-gigs. We wanted the choir to do those parts as well. That basically meant that I had to do all scores all over again. I wrote down the parts in MIDI, then I added the parts from the recordings and then I turn them into sheet music. This all seems not that hard, but to give you an idea: Oliver and I have been working on this for two months already."