Luca Turilli — born in Italy in 1972 — is the guitarist, composer and co-founder of Rhapsody of Fire, and the person chiefly responsible for a format that became known as film score metal. The idea was to take power metal to the scale of cinema music. Instead of keyboards imitating an orchestra, Turilli and Alex Staropoli began writing for real orchestra and choir, with arrangements conceived as a symphonic score rather than as accompaniment. Symphony of Enchanted Lands (1998) and its 2004 sequel are the fullest examples: there are recurring themes, motifs attached to characters and a compositional logic inherited from concert music. The lyrics form a continuous narrative. The so-called Emerald Sword Saga runs across five albums and tells an epic fantasy story with fixed characters, battles and a resolution — and the British actor Christopher Lee narrated passages on several records, lending the work a gravity no metal singer could produce. As a guitarist, Turilli combines high-speed neoclassical phrasing with melodies of Mediterranean inflection, a vocabulary that influenced the whole power metal scene of southern Europe. He left Rhapsody of Fire in 2011 and continued with his own projects under variations of the name, keeping the same symphonic conception.
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