If you like gothic metal and didn’t hear about Within Temptation you should check them out! Formed in 1996 around the nucleus of guitarist Robert Westerholt and vocalist Sharon den Adel, the Dutch band have now sold over 2 million CDs and DVDs world-wide, making them not only Holland’s biggest selling musical export but also one of the fastest growing new rock acts internationally.
One of their greatest concerts is the one with the Metropole Orchestra in Ahoy Rotterdam which took place on February 7th 2008. Entitled ‘ Black Symphony‘ the concert featured the PA dam choir, guest singers (Keith Caputo, George Oosthoek and Anneke van Giersbergen), a 400 square meters video screen, great lighting effects and pyrotechnics and was a great succes.
In November and December the band made their first theatre tour in The Netherlands and Belgium, where they performed their songs in a more acoustic setting, the tour will continue in April and May, you can check their tourdates on their website if you want to attend, it will probably be a memorable show.
Regarding The Black Symphony concert, it was filmed by 14 HD-Cameras and released on DVD, Blu-ray and CD by the end of 2008 in 40 countries simultaneously. Black Symphony reached a top-10 position in 11 countries, from which 8 top-3 positions.
You can watch a preview of the concert and an interview with the band members about the Black Symphony concert in the following video:
You can buy the Black Symphony concert dvd from here:
An unconventional video got my attention on musicradar.com, a concert of Jean Michel Jarre compressed in just about 2 minutes. It’s an interesting video, as you can see the beginning of the gig with the crowd filling in the concert hall, the entire concert with the movement on the stage, the lights and the final with the crowd living and the gear being gathered from the stage.
Although an interesting approach for a video, the drawback is that there’s no sound, well you can’t compress that in 2 minutes too, or you can but you wouldn’t understand anything.
Anyway everyone knows that Jean Michel Jarre’s performances are great expressions of visual arts to, not only music. Well you can see the video down the page, but if you have the chance I suggest you go for the real thing and go at a concert, if Jarre is performing near you. You can check his tourdates and buy tickets here.