Blind Guardian Twilight Orchestra

This spin-off project from the German power metal giants sees them perform with a purely orchestral backing on the fantasy-inspired 2019 concept album Legacy of the Dark Lands.
In the late ’90s, Blind Guardian frontman and mastermind Hansi Kürsch got the idea for the band to make an orchestral album after they were briefly considered for scoring Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The closest they came was their 1998 epic Nightfall in Middle-Earth, a Tolkien-inspired concept epic with spoken word passages that was hailed as a triumph by fans. But it would be another 20 years before they finally realized their dream of a fully orchestral album with no rock instruments. In 2019, they launched the Twilight Orchestra project with the album Legacy of the Dark Lands. Written by German fantasy author Markus Heitz as a sequel to his novel Die Dunklen Lande (“The Dark Lands”) — a fantasy epic set during the Thirty Years’ War — and performed by the Prague Filmharmonic Orchestra and Choir with Kürsch on lead vocals, the album was an operatic Wagnerian epic which, like Nightfall, featured spoken-word interludes performed by the same actors who had appeared on that album. ~ John D. Buchanan