7 Times David Garrett Mashed Classical Music Into a Rock Song

So on his crossover albums, he doesn’t just cover rock songs — he often welds them to a classical piece, or rearranges a classical warhorse with rock energy. Here are seven moments where the seams between centuries are doing the heavy lifting.

• • •

1. “Vivaldi vs. Vertigo” — Winter meets U2. The most literal mash-up in his catalogue. On Rock Symphonies (2010), David opens with a track that fuses the opening of Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’ concerto from The Four Seasons with U2’s ‘Vertigo’. Two pieces written 280 years apart, sharing the same nervous, driving energy — and David’s arrangement makes that obvious in about ten seconds. If you want to hear his thesis in a single track, start here.
2. “The 5th” — Beethoven goes rock. Also on Rock Symphonies: a full rock-band reimagining of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Those four iconic opening notes — da-da-da-DUM — turn out to be the most metal motif ever written by a guy in a powdered wig. David doesn’t dress Beethoven up in a leather jacket so much as point out the jacket was always there.

3. “Toccata” — Bach with a backbeat. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor is already pretty close to heavy metal (try arguing otherwise). David’s Rock Symphonies version leans all the way in, treating it as the rock track it was secretly always trying to be. It’s a great answer to anyone who thinks classical music can’t have a riff.
4. “Asturias” — flamenco fire on a violin. Albéniz wrote Asturias for piano in 1892, evoking the rhythms of Spanish flamenco guitar. David’s version trades the piano (and the guitar adaptations that came later) for amplified violin and rock-band orchestration. It’s a great example of how his arrangements aren’t just ‘classical piece + drums’ — they reach for whichever musical tradition fits the source’s spirit.
5. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — Nirvana through a classical lens. David’s cover of Nirvana’s grunge anthem is probably his most-watched crossover moment — he famously played it at the Royal Variety Performance in 2011. What makes it interesting isn’t just ‘violinist plays Nirvana’. It’s how he phrases Kurt Cobain’s vocal line: with the dynamic shaping and breath of a classical soloist treating the melody like an aria. The angst stays. The phrasing changes everything.
6. “Kashmir” — Led Zeppelin’s Eastern modes meet a string orchestra. Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’ was already drawing on non-Western scales and orchestral grandeur. David’s Rock Symphonies arrangement leans into the orchestral half, letting the strings carry the famous riff with the weight of a film score. It’s a useful reminder that Zeppelin themselves were classical-curious — David’s version just finishes the thought.
7. The whole Garrett vs. Paganini concept. After playing Paganini in the 2013 biopic The Devil’s Violinist, David released Garrett vs. Paganini — an album that sits Paganini’s actual works (Caprice No. 24, La Campanella, Carnival of Venice) next to crossover tracks featuring Andrea Bocelli and Nicole Scherzinger. The framing is the whole point: 19th-century shred virtuoso vs. 21st-century pop-classical star, treated as the same tradition. Paganini was the rock star of his era — David’s argument is that not much has actually changed.

• • •

In a 2012 essay for Classic FM, David laid out the thinking behind all of this. He sees himself as part of a lineage — Paganini, Wieniawski, Sarasate, Kreisler — of violin virtuosos who built their careers on borrowing popular tunes of their day and elevating them. By his read, the great 19th-century virtuosos frequently used popular tunes as a base for many of their compositions. He’s just doing the same thing with the popular music of our time.

That reframes his rock arrangements completely. They’re not a gimmick or a sellout move from a classical player — they’re a deeply traditional approach to violin showmanship, just pointed at Metallica instead of folk songs.

So the next time you put on Rock Symphonies or Rock Revolution, listen with one ear in each century. The wall between ‘serious’ and ‘fun’ music turns out to be thinner than anyone told you.

— The Strings Society Editorial Team