DVD Reviews

Director: Chris Cowey Starring: Ian Gillan, Ian Paice, Roger Glover, Steve Morse, Don Airey, Neue Philharmonie Frankfurt, conducted by Stephen Bentley-Klein

Sitting on my record shelf is ‘20 Explosive Hits’, a compilation of Australian charting hits from 1971. And there it is: Deep Purple’s ‘Black Night’. Yes, one of the founding songs of the movement that would become heavy metal was a pop hit.

On this concert disc from four decades later, ‘Black Knight’ is the second encore number.

For all the driving rock, Deep Purple was always a band to experiment with orchestras, more or less inventing the collaboration with ‘Concerto for Group and Orchestra’ in 1969.

Jon Lord wrote that, but he was long gone from the band by the time of the 2011 ‘The Songs that Built Rock’ tour. The concert captured on this disc was performed in Verona in an ancient Roman open-air amphitheatre.

This is the Mark VIII incarnation of the group, which has been stable this past fourteen years. It includes Ian Gillan, Ian Paise and Roger Glover from what might be called the ‘Classic Purple’ era of ‘In Rock’, ‘Fireball’ and ‘Machine Head’.

An essential part of the Deep Purple sound has the Hammond organ, now ably wielded by Don Airey. This had the same old lush sound… and the same sense of running out of guts when much is being demanded from the lower registers. Gillan had lost much of his top vocal octave when it came to screaming, but the fact that he could do any at all was amazing. Like the rest of the band, he looked to be having a lot of fun up there.

The orchestra was at times fully participating in the music, though at times only a quiet accompaniment. The concert opens with a brief, orchestra-only overture evoking the themes of the many classic songs to come. When it gets to Lazy, conductor Bentley-Klein gets a manic solo on his violin.

The sound defaults to stereo in 24-bit/96kHz LPCM but can be switched to DTS-HD Master Audio, also in 24/96.

I maintain a database that I’ve built up over nearly twenty years containing the technical details of DVDs and Blu-ray discs. When I was transferring the figures from it over the specification box for this title, I figured I’d made a typo into the database. A DTS-HD Master Audio bitrate of 8588kbps? That’s the second highest bitrate of any DTS-HD MA content I’ve measured. But the log file for the disc analysis confirmed that it was so.

There is an enormous amount going on in the 5.1 mix, in part due to the preservation of the open-air ambience. There’s an enormous acoustic space in this performance, without detracting at all from impact.

Stephen Dawson [www.hifi-writer.com]