Rockers Who Experimented With A Full Orchestra — And Absolutely Pulled It Off

Rock, metal, and orchestral instruments are far more intertwined than folks might think. From the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" to Bush's "Glycerine," bands have incorporated violins, cellos, flutes, horns, etc., for decades. But a full orchestral accompaniment while playing live? That's another, far more ambitious venture entirely, though some rockers have pulled it off with expertise and gusto.

"Pulled it off" could mean a variety of things. Some musicians just want to meet artistic expectations, like Devin Townsend's 2017, nearly three-hour symphonic extravaganza with the Orchestra and Choir of Plovdiv State Opera at the Ancient Theatre of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Other musicians, like Bring Me the Horizon, did the orchestral thing at London's Royal Albert Hall in 2016 to raise money for the NPO Teenage Cancer Trust. Both shows were resounding successes in their own ways. Other artists, like Finnish symphonic legends Nightwish or Italian symphonic-death metal outfit Fleshgod Apocalypse, are inherently "orchestral" in instrumentation and composition but have never played with a full orchestra live. Full orchestras are extremely expensive and involve rewriting musical parts to make rock instruments and orchestral instruments fit together. Plus, all the musicians have to get paid.

To date, there's really only one full orchestral show that's been extremely monetarily successful: Metallica's 1999 S&M show, which sold 8 million copies. Since then, loads of bands have done orchestral shows to varying degrees of success. Here are some of the rockers who pulled it off.

Easily the most well-known of our entries and the first chronologically, Metallica's S&M blew people's minds when it aired on MTV in 2000 (recorded the year prior in 1999). You had James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich, and the ever-underappreciated Jason Newsted, and the 80-piece San Francisco Symphony doing their thing. They played a curated list of 'Tallica hits like "Nothing Else Matters" (perfect for an orchestral pairing) and new tracks like "No Leaf Clover," aka, a song we'll die on the hill of calling one of the band's best songs — ever.

No matter that it's pretty commonplace to find bands dipping into orchestral arrangements nowadays, Metallica's S&M was a bit of a gamble at the time. It seemed like a bizarre pairing. After all, aren't orchestras for snobs in balconies sniffing their own farts while swooning over dainty, 19th-century piano arpeggios? And aren't rock and metal for raw riffage and smash-your-face guitar muscle? Well, well, Metallica proved the two could fuse. Admittedly, some songs in the playlist don't mesh as well with an orchestra as others, like "Wherever I May Roam," which is basically the original song with some violin notes in the background. Other songs like "The Call of Ktulu" work marvelously with an orchestra and draw out the natural grandeur of Metallica's best tracks.

In the end, S&M was a huge hit. The album alone, not counting DVD sales, sold 8 million copies. Hetfield and the boys set the standard for band-meets-orchestra matchups from then on and even reprised the orchestral thing in 2020 with S&M2. The most metal track that time was "The Iron Foundry, Opus 19" by Russian composer Alexander Mosolov. It's jaw-droppingly heavy, thrumming, and stank face-inducing. Amazing work.

Metallica set a pretty high bar with S&M. But German hard rock outfit Scorpions, whose discography in and of itself defines rock history, followed suit in 2000 with "Moment of Glory." That year, the arena rock quintet pulled off the unlikely feat of pairing lyrics like "So give her inches and feed her well" (from "Rock You Like a Hurricane") with majestic, rousing instrumentation courtesy of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Scorpions recorded the set during the 2000 Hannover Expo in Germany, a kind of world fair that attracted 18 million visitors. No pressure.

Scorpions' set was short, but it covered a variety of songs across the group's albums. The band did renditions of hits like "Still Loving You" and "Wind of Change," a colossal track that marked the fall of the Berlin Wall and was so socially impactful that some folks swear that the CIA wrote it. There was also a well-composed medley of songs beautifully bundled into a piece called "Deadly Sting Suite." The lead guitar work in that song, plus the band's rock instruments in general, does overpower the orchestra at times and doesn't always fit. But on a whole, "Moment of Glory" is surprisingly well-done. It even comes equipped with a new, self-titled song that, uh ... features a cluster of kids gently swaying to a rock ballad? It's not the best. Let's just be glad the kids didn't hear the lyrics to "Rock You Like a Hurricane." 

"Moment of Glory" didn't sell a lot, but given Scorpions' pedigree and the group's 110 million total albums sold, it didn't have to. The act's name did much of the heavy-lifting for the event and maintained the standard for future band-meets-orchestra mashups. 

Now it's time to pay homage to the biggest prog metal power-nerd to ever wield a glowy guitar and sport some of the most awful skullets around (he's said so himself, no worries): Devin Townsend. More accurately, the Devin Townsend Project, not the Devin Townsend Band or his Devin Townsend solo project. The last chapter of our misfit hero's sundry experimental musical misadventures with the Devin Townsend Project came with 2018's live album, "Ocean Machine." Recorded the year prior in 2017, Townsend performed the show with the backing of the Orchestra and Choir of Plovdiv State Opera at the Ancient Roman Theatre of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, a roughly 2,000-year-old venue.

As Townsend said on his record label's website, HevyDevy, the epic nature of the orchestra-backed show was meant to wrap up his time with the Devin Townsend Project in the grandest way possible. Hence the name of the album, "Ocean Machine," which is a callback to his first solo record, 1997's "Ocean Machine: Biomech." The show included all of that inaugural album plus a collection of Townsend fan favorites, equaling a monstrous runtime of about 2 hours and 42 minutes. This is by far the most ambitious and lengthy of the shows we're highlighting in this article, one that really tested whether Townsend's wall-of-sound production design fit the wall of sound of an orchestra. 

But have no fear, because Townsend and crew pulled it off. Right from the enormous-sounding opening instrumental track "Truth," the set sounds completely fantastic. The orchestra amplified the brightness and natural grandiosity in Townsend's music to memorialize the Devin Townsend Project in the most fitting way possible. 

Symphonic black metal outfit Dimmu Borgir isn't just exquisitely well-suited to orchestral arrangements — the group has featured actual orchestras on its studio albums more and more since its 1994 debut. In 2011, the band decided to do an utterly exclusive, one-of-a-kind concert at the Oslo Spektrum arena in their native Norway dubbed "Forces of the Northern Night." The show featured the 53-piece Norwegian Radio Orchestra and a 30-person Schola Cantorum choir, dressed like hooded monks for full theatrical effect. The result was jaw-dropping. The concert didn't merely mingle orchestral instruments with rock instruments — it created one fused whole that arguably stands as the best show of its type.

Fans of Dimmu Borgir might hear "Forces of the Northern Night" and think, "This is what the band always sound like." True, but the performance in question was the one and only time that the orchestral components weren't backing tracks during a live performance. It also pumped up the orchestra's role to an immense, majestic movie-score level. It was such a good performance that Dimmu Borgir released it twice, once in 2014 and later in 2017. The former was only released as a non-commercial CD and doesn't live on Spotify (but can be found at auction). The latter had a digital release and was also released on DVD along with a 2012 Wacken Open Air performance, but both are the same 2011 show.

"Forces of the Northern Night" was such a resounding success that Dimmu Borgir dove further into symphonic territory from then on, starting with 2018's "Eonian." The album, counterintuitively, switched to sampled orchestral instruments rather than actual musicians. This granted the group a greater degree of control over composition, a tactic that's guided the landmark band since then.

Sheffield metalcore-meets-electronica group Bring Me the Horizon (BMTH) isn't exactly the first band you'd imagine when thinking of orchestral shows. Nowadays, the ultra-successful quartet is leagues different from the group's 2006 debut, a savage, riff-filled, harsh-vocal outing suited to circle pits rather than later, synth-heavy, pop-rock dance tracks like "Can You Feel My Heart" (suitable for getting you through the pain of a single Valentine's Day). It only took 10 years from the debut for the band to leverage its evolved sound and success to go all out ... for charity. Yes, these good blokes did the orchestral thing not for fame, money, ego, or even artistic fulfillment (though that was certainly present) but for the Teenage Cancer Trust. BMTH, plus the 60-person Parallax Orchestra, rocked London's Royal Albert Hall in 2016. 

Vocalist Oli Sykes acted like an anchor through the show, or an MC, rather than an attention-seeking frontman, while the orchestra expertly filled out the soundscape. This isn't a fluke, as the Parallax Orchestra was founded the year prior to BMTH's show, in 2015, for the express purpose of providing support to bands. They even perform video game music, as evidenced by the band's rendition of "The Best Is Yet To Come" from the "Metal Gear Solid" stealth-action series, which the act incorporated into its set ahead of "True Friends." If you're a fan of symphonic music, BMTH, "Metal Gear," games, rock, metal, or all of the above, the "Live at the Royal Albert Hall" performance will leave you impressed.

As far as the Teenage Cancer Trust money-raising aspect of the show is concerned, the NPO didn't release its earnings. But the show was sold out, which made it a fundraising success.