The sound of the sea in your ears after a concert. For those who are regular visitors to a concert, the chance is considerable that that sound, at one moment, will not leave anymore. That 'one' moment for me came after a Motörhead gig back in 2007. During the gig something broke. Irreversible. And something was gone forever: the silence. In return I got back the sound of waves, to stay with me forever. From that day, the prelude from Das Rheingold starts with the sound of the ocean and not with silence. Eardrums are badworking airbags when it comes to a collision with a high amount of decibels. 

The risks, of course, are not limited to rock and metalbands alone ...  

Viktoriya Yermolyeva is a classical trained pianist who does a proud job as knight of the holy grail. The holy grail of heavy metal that is. Her piano transcription of Metallica’s Master of Puppets captures the dynamics of the original song remarkable well.

Many branches grew on the tree of musical innovations Franz Liszt planted in the course of the 19th century. And Mephisto’s Waltz in the Liszt-Busoni-Horowitz transcription makes a strong case for the proposition that heavy metal was one of them. In this keyboard meltdown Vladimir Horowitz uses everything but the kitchen sink to bring down the house. Catapulting the piece right into the stratosphere where it claims it well deserved place in the holy grail of piano music.