George & The QSO: In Too Deep.

George and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra play the QPAC Concert Hall on Friday and Saturday.

“John Lord had been talking about the concerto, and how he’d wanted to do it in Australia, but he didn’t want to do it with Deep Purple. He wrote it back in 1969, and they’ve done it about forty times, but never in Australia. The orchestra called up and said we’ll do it, and we know just the band...”

Hence the unusual marriage about to link George and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra for a two-night performance of Deep Purple’s Concerto For Group And Orchestra as well as a tasty sample of George's forthcoming album Polyserena. Toby Wren, who has been busy scoring George's material for the orchestra, explains.

“It’s sort of a world premiere of the piece being played by anyone other that Deep Purple.”

Getting George involved in the project was not too difficult a task.

“Immediately they loved the idea of playing with the orchestra, but there was a bit of skepticism about Deep Purple. Deep Purple is a very different band than George, obviously. They were concerned they would end up sounding like Deep Purple, which won’t happen There’s a lot of interpretation on the band side of it. They didn’t want to sound like a bad Deep Purple copy.”

Obviously this will be quite a different event for both punters used to George taking to club stages for their own shows, as well as for the regular orchestral audience. The spread of the material and the shows line up reflects the differences in musical styles.

“The program for the concert is broken up into a few parts. There’s an orchestral introduction, the material from George's album and some of their older stuff, which is where I step in. The second half of the concert is this John Lord concerto.”

“It’s really just good music. George will be doing a lot of things people haven’t heard before with the chamber orchestra.”

Was George's material difficult to arrange for a larger ensemble?

“It is. When you listen to a rock group play a song, or just George themselves, it’s a really different sound. There are a lot of things you have to do differently when you add an orchestra in. You really just have to compliment the sound of the band. It’s more to do with what instruments you’re using and things like that. There’s a little bit of push and pull, but for the most part George's parts are unchanged. On their new album there’s a bit of stuff with string accompaniment, so the space was there and we’re just beefing things up a bit.”