Luca Turilli's Rhapsody

Luca Turilli's Rhapsody emerged in 2011 from the split of Rhapsody of Fire into two branches. After nearly two decades of partnership, guitarist and composer Luca Turilli and keyboardist Alex Staropoli decided to go separate ways, each carrying the band's legacy under a name of his own: Staropoli kept Rhapsody of Fire, while Turilli formed Luca Turilli's Rhapsody, taking vocalist Fabio Lione with him — who for a few years divided himself between the two projects. The separation was announced as amicable, an artistic decision about directions that no longer converged rather than a personal rupture. Turilli's branch openly embraced an approach he named "cinematic metal": Hollywood-scale orchestration, large-scale choral recordings, extremely high-gloss production and a sonic ambition reaching beyond the traditional vocabulary of symphonic power metal. Ascending to Infinity, released in 2012, was the calling card for that approach, arriving with notable heaviness and sonic clarity alongside one of Lione's most dramatic performances. Prometheus — Symphonia Ignis Divinus followed in 2015 and pushed the concept further still, with a dense conceptual structure, expansive orchestral and choral contributions, and passages flirting with film music, science fiction and philosophical symbolism. It is frequently cited as the technical peak of Turilli's production work. In 2016 the project was wound up, and Turilli and Lione redirected the collaboration into Turilli/Lione Rhapsody, formed in 2018 after the classic line-up's reunion tour. Brief though it was — two albums in five years — Luca Turilli's Rhapsody left a lasting mark: the fullest demonstration of what symphonic power metal could sound like when produced with no economy of means whatsoever.