EPICA Keyboardist Talks About Upcoming 'Classical Conspiracy' Concert

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.

EPICA keyboardist Coen Janssen recently gave an interview to the event organizers about the upcoming concert. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Q: What was your first idea when you heard about the invitation of Miskolc International Opera Festival?

Coen: The first thing that went through my mind was probably that it was going to be a big opportunity but also a big challenge since it involves a lot of work. But who cares about a little work if you can play with a live orchestra and choir?

Q: EPICA has played only one classical concert, a short performance so far. Can you tell me something about it? What kind of feelings had you got when you were playing with orchestra and choir?

Coen: That time was a lot easier then this one because it was only four songs. The orchestrations were done by the director of the orchestra so we didn't have to work on that as well. It was a good first experience for us to play with an orchestra and choir. I think we learned a lot from it. You have to focus on different things when you play in a different setting then normal. For me personally it was also a strange experience because normally I play all the string parts and other orchestral stuff on my keyboards, but now I only had to do the piano parts and organ parts. But what I like the most is when you start to play and you are in the middle of the orchestra or choir! The sound of that is amazing and since you're normally in front of the orchestra this is quite a unique experience.

Q: How do you make the scores for the orchestra and the choir? Please describe your creative process from the first step to the last one.

Coen: 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.

Read the entire interview at this location.