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Rick van der Linden

RICK VAN DER LINDEN
 
 
Rick van der Linden  (5 August 1946, Badhoevedorp, North Holland – 22 January 2006, Groningen) was a Dutch composer and keyboardist.  Van der Linden first gained fame as a member of Ekseption, but played in several other bands including most notably Trace, as well as solo.  Like his contemporary Keith Emerson, van der Linden was best known for his popular reworkings of classical music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and other composers.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
I am pretty sure that I must have heard a track or two by the Dutch progressive rock band Ekseption on college radio back in the day; otherwise, I don’t know how Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” would sound so familiar to me.  Their virtuoso bandleader Rick van der Linden was a wizard at combining classical music forms with rock, but that statement alone doesn’t do justice to their music:  Every album was good, and they were also quite different from one another.   
 
(January 2013)