ONSTAGE PRODUCTIONS

Glacial Inferno & Revenge
Review by www.dprp.net

First of all I have to apologize to all concerned and interested for the long delay in finishing and publishing this review!
A long time ago, when I was still young and ignorant, I started to discover the wide variety of modern pop music and that there was more to it than Abba and The Bee Gees and everything else that was in the hit parades. Although it was still many years before I fully encountered the well hidden world of sympho and prog music, the first few elements of that world already reached my attention. But first I went through my hard-rock years when the more heavier, guitar driven, rock sounds were what appealed most to my feelings and needs; that was in the eighties when bands like Europe, Bon Jovi, Whitesnake etc surfaced. I developed a preference for groups as Deep Purple and Uriah Heep, mostly because of their splendid and frequent use of keys and organs. Even then I wasn't that keen on vocals and preferred instrumentals that often pleased my ears the most.
On a certain day I stumbled on the debut album of Yngwie J. Malmsteen and I was totally swept off my feet by it! I never knew this kind of music existed and it was right up my alley; great instrumental tunes, very melodic, heavy and often influenced by fine classical music; I was sold. After that I naturally also fell for Yngwie's followers like Tony MacAlpine and Vinnie Moore and those other guitar masters like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani and also the great keyboard wizards like Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson, Jordan Rudess, Pär Lindh, Erik Norlander etc; again because of their musical variety and melodic creative style of music making with classical influences. Making a modern or proggy version of classical music or incorporate classical music into modern symphonic music, both often described as 'neo-classical', is something I have been affectionate with ever since. And now I can add Vitalij Kuprij to my short list in that category!
Vitalij Kuprij was born in 1974 in Ukraine and began his serious piano studies at Kiev's Mykola Lyssenko Music Academy for highly talented and selected students. After graduation from this major conservatory he went to Switzerland to study at the world renowned Basel Conservatoire where he obtained his second degree. In 1995 Vitalij Kuprij went to the United States upon recommendation by Sir James Galway to begin further music studies and where, while on full scholarship, he obtained another degree and graduated from this world famous institution in 2000. So it's clear this musician is an excellent piano player, totally trained and educated for classical music and is without doubt more famous in the world of classical music than the prog world we focus on. So you might wonder what his album is doing here on this site, but in this respect a slight comparison with W.A. Mozart comes to mind who has often been described as the rock star of the 18th century. So even though Vitalij is highly acknowledged as a classical piano player and has won several prestigious prizes around the world he seems to have the urge to make modern rock music as well, naturally with some classical sauce poured over it. In fact his own website actually consists of two divided sections, a classical side and a rock side. Being totally incompetent of making any sensible comments on the classical accomplishments of Vitalij Kuprij I naturally will focus only on his rock side.
This album, Glacial Inferno, is already the fifth solo rock album by Vitalij and next to that he's also a member of the group Artension who already released seven albums and an ex-member of Ring Of Fire who produced three albums including him on keyboards. Besides that he also was a guest musician on more than a dozen albums by other artists! Adding all his classical albums to that it seems it's hard to find any longer period in which not some kind of musical outing by Vitalij has seen the day of light. On Glacial Inferno he gets assistance by Michael Harris on guitar and the former Yngwie Malmsteen and Ark rhythm section consisting of John Maccaluso on drums and Randy Coven on bass.
This latest album, released early 2007, also came out as a limited edition double pack of just 2000 with Vitalij's latest band project release Revenge, which until now has been unavailable outside Asia. It's a promo of this double pack we're reviewing here, that by the way does contains a few mastering errors that hopefully have been eliminated in the final product.
About Glacial Inferno Vitalij comments:
"The aim of the album was to express myself musically and compositionally in the best possible way to make my friends and fans enjoy it and relate to it, as well as to grow further as an artist and composer/instrumentalist and producer". Indeed that reveals nothing much about what to expect from this album, so let me inform you about that.
I actually already gave it partly away earlier in this article, placing Vitalij Kup - Various