RAMMSTEIN Get The Symphonic Treatment

"Mein Herz Brennt", performed by the Dresden Symphony Orchestra and based on texts written by RAMMSTEIN, will celebrate its world premiere on Thursday (Nov. 20),according to DW-World.de.

The band themselves were not involved with the project, but their lyrics captured the imagination of Sven Helbig. The founder of the Dresden Symphony Orchestra came up with the idea of basing a classical song cycle on their texts when he noticed how much RAMMSTEIN's recurring themes of sorrow, loneliness and yearning were anchored in the 19th century German Romantic tradition.

"The first thing I noticed about RAMMSTEIN were the texts," says Helbig. "Then later I was attracted to the energy of the music, and the power of the material. The challenge was to transform this material into a classical song cycle without toadying to RAMMSTEIN fans or jumping on a bandwagon."

He solved the problem by commissioning Dresden-based composer Torsten Rasch to create a contemporary, orchestral song-cycle to be performed by the 110 musicians of the Dresden Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Carewe. Vocals are supplied by René Pape, an opera star at the New York Metropolitan Opera and USA Vocalist of the Year 2002, who joins forces with gravelly-voiced German actress Katharina Thalbach, familiar to international audiences from Volker Schlöndorff's film "The Tin Drum". Thalbach's spoken-word rendition of RAMMSTEIN's lyrics perfectly sets off Pape's classically-trained baritone.

"Mein Herz Brennt" (German for "My Heart Burns") will be performed at the Kulturpalast Dresden on Nov. 20 and at the Berlin Arena on Nov. 21.