Jon Lord - The Official Website

Jon Lord’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra will be performed for the first time in Scotland next year (cities and venues to be confirmed).

News.scotsman.com reports on the event:

‘As music teachers go, he has to be one of the coolest in town. Deep Purple legend Jon Lord will be taking a group of budding Edinburgh rock stars under his wing as they prepare for a special performance of one of his seminal works.

The six local students, aged between 16 and 22, will be playing with Lord, as well as the Scottish Philharmonic orchestra and students from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama Glasgow, next year.’

Read the full article.

Jon Lord will join Deep Purple onstage for this year’s Sunflower Jam. The charity show takes place at Porchester Halls in London on September 25.

Confirming that this is a one-off, Jon Lord is excited by the prospect of playing with Deep Purple for the first time in six years.

- I am looking massively forward to playing some of those grand old Purple numbers again, Jon Lord says.

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Hi everyone

Just a quick couple of things.

First and foremost, thank you all so much for the questions and the very kind and sometimes moving comments you have posted on the website. From people who have seen me play lately, from people who’ve not seen me for a while and from those who’ve never seen me at all - they are all gratefully recieved.

I’m happy that you are enjoying Durham Concerto, Boom of the Tingling Strings and Disguises. They, amongst other works, have occupied my time pretty much from the year in which I left the Purps.

Although I am still writing like a man possessed, I am now moving towards doing more live work - both with orchestras and also with a ‘Jon Lord Band’ project which will include more Hammond (+ second keys, guitar, bass, drums, percussion and a sing-ist), some new stuff, and one or two carefully selected songs from the past that I had a small part in writing!

I hope too that I will soon be able to answer some of your questions specifically - such as “When are you coming to such-and-such a place?” and so on. I will try to make my comments to the site a more regular thing too.

In the meantime, stay well and keep the music with you.

God bless
Jon

In an interview with Metal Express Radio, Jon Lord speaks of the Durham Concerto, his plans for the future and goes over the high points of the past.

On the Durham Concerto CD:

- This is a studio recording that we made last July in Liverpool in the Philharmonic Hall. We had two and a half days up there to record that. It’s the same piece as you heard in the Cathedral but done under studio conditions so we were able to control the acoustics.

- I actually thought the Classic FM live recording was very good and captured the acoustics of the Cathedral but the CD is in a more acoustic controlled setting. I’m thrilled to bits with how it’s turned out.

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Jon Lord and Zermatt have a long history together, and promoting last night’s performance at Zermatt Unplugged, Lord speaks to Zermatt.ch about his first visit there 36 years ago:

- I first visited the village in December 1971 and fell in love with it on the spot. Since then, I come back at least two or three times every year, mostly in winter to ski, but now and again in summer too for hiking. We have even had a small flat here for the last eight years. Read the rest of this entry ?

Jon Lord will be performing with the Gemini Band tonight in Zermatt, Switzerland.

If you are going to the show, please feel free to post your own review below in the comments.

Jon Lord appeared with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for another performance of the Durham Concerto on April 5 in Liverpool (Philharmonic Hall). Read the reviews below in the comments and feel free to contribute your own review of the concert.

The Durham Concerto was released on CD on January 28th (Avie Records).

Adelaide Now reviews Jon Lord’s first performance with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (March 27):

‘The concerto, lost for almost 30 years, occupied the first half of the program and truly set a new benchmark for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s rock crossover programming.

While it bears a few quirky hallmarks of its era, for the most part Lord’s epic three-movement composition not only stands the test of time, but shines as a successful – and ground-breaking – fusion of rock and symphony.’

Read the full review.

The Australian talks to Jon Lord about how he created a new sound for the Hammond organ when he plugged it into a stack of Marshall amps:

- I suppose I felt I had to compete with the guitarists. What I discovered was that the Hammond organ, when treated like that, makes a heck of a noise.

The interview also focuses on the Concerto for Group and Orchestra and how the musical climate was different in 1969. Lord says many classical and rock purists missed the point:

- The piece was written with a sense of love and to enjoy the experience of playing with an orchestra as much as to enjoy the experience of playing with a rock band.

- It was written by a guy who was, and still is, massively in love with both ends of the musical spectrum.

Read the full interview.

In an interview with Giessener Allgemeine, Jon Lord talks about 40 years of the Concerto, the open rehearsal at Hagen, his new Boom of the Tingling Strings and more.

Listen to the interview segments here:

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