10 great classical moments from Electric Light Orchestra (ELO)

In honor of “Over and Out,” the final tour by Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra — which is touring nationally and made a stop in St. Paul on Sept. 30 — here are 10 moments in which ELO’s signature fusion of classical and rock music really shone.

‘10538 Overture’

“10538 Overture,” ELO’s first single, is not an overture in the strictest sense — namely because it features lyrics, telling the story of an escaped prisoner identified as 10538. But it fulfills an overture’s function as an introduction, acquainting the world with ELO’s burgeoning style. The song was originally intended for Electric Light Orchestra’s rock band predecessor, The Move. However, founding member Roy Wood’s experimentation with “Jimi Hendrix type riffs,” played on an inexpensive cello and overdubbed over a dozen times, turned this track into a first foray into what would become ELO’s idiosyncratic combination of classical strings and rock music.

‘Roll Over Beethoven’

Chuck Berry’s original version of “Roll Over Beethoven” was a cheeky sendup of Western classical snobbery, but in ELO’s hands, the song becomes at once a sendup and loving homage. ELO takes a literal approach, beginning with a strings-only rendition of the famous opening to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, before bandleader Jeff Lynne comes roaring in with Chuck Berry’s signature guitar riff. The Beethoven quotations, after that, return only as occasional interpolations and at the track’s close. ELO’s classical/rock combination at this stage in its career is more juxtaposition than fusion.

‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’

This track from ELO’s third album, On the Third Day, opens with a brief excerpt of the first movement of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. Then it segues into a rock-band-plus-strings cover of the suite’s fourth movement, the ominous “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Although a drum kit certainly doesn’t feature in the classical piece, ELO’s take nonetheless preserves much of Grieg’s material — albeit slowed down and repeated in sections, giving it less sprightly mischief and more progressive-rock churn.

‘Daytripper’

Far more obscure than ELO’s studio recordings, this rollicking, one-word cover of the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” supercharges its source material with clear Rolling Stones influence, including a quote of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” while juxtaposing classical quotations courtesy of keyboardist Richard Tandy. His solos include an excerpt of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C-Major on piano and an excerpt of George Frideric Handel’s “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from his oratorio Solomon on synthesizer.

‘Eldorado’ (entire album)

After significant play with juxtaposing classical and rock, and translating classical into rock, ELO’s Eldorado album sees the band begin to transpose rock into classical. This concept album, telling the story of a bleary-eyed banker given to flights of fantasy, features string work opening, closing and weaving together its tracks. Louis Clark arranged Lynne’s ideas for symphony orchestra and conducted the orchestra during the recording session, signaling the first-time use of a full orchestra on ELO’s studio albums.

‘Fire on High’

The opening track of Face the Music is a prog-rock morality play featuring excerpts from the “Hallelujah” chorus of Handel’s Messiah, representing the heavenly, and a jarring diabolus in musica motif, an interval associated with evil since the medieval period in Europe. As for nonclassical features, the distorted, spoken vocal is drummer Bev Bevan’s voice saying, in reverse, “The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back! Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!”

‘Rockaria!’

This track from ELO’s A New World Record sees a return to the band’s “Roll Over Beethoven” cheekiness, at once gently ribbing and warmly embracing Western classical music culture. The lyrics name-check Richard Wagner, Beethoven, Giacomo Puccini and Giuseppe Verdi as fond favorites of an opera singer, whom the speaker of the song hopes to convert to singing the blues. Welsh soprano Mary Thomas, a frequent collaborator with Peter Maxwell Davies, sings in the introduction and twice more throughout the song — “Weit, weit in die Ferne / Man hört, man hört die Musik” — which Lynne sings later, translated to English: “Far, far away / the music is playing.”

‘Concerto for a Rainy Day’

Pop-music scholar Mark Spicer refers to the Out of the Blue album as “ELO’s Sgt. Pepper,” the pinnacle of the band’s achievements using studio as instrument — and nowhere is ELO’s power more clearly on full display than this four-track suite, inspired by a weather-related cure to Lynne’s writer’s block. The “Concerto” in the title sets expectations of interconnected movements on a shared theme, and as with Eldorado, instrumental interludes weave the tracks together. The concerto concludes with what might be ELO’s best-known song, “Mr. Blue Sky,” but despite that track’s catchiness on its own, it packs even more of a punch in context.

‘Time’ (entire album)

With the Time album, ELO returns to the high-concept approach it had last employed for Eldorado. However, this time, rather than using a full symphony, most of the instrumentation is filled out by synthesizer work from Richard Tandy, befitting Time’s science-fiction story about a protagonist who is trapped in the future.

‘Hello My Old Friend’

Although this track was cut from the original release of Secret Messages, it provides a fitting retrospective on ELO’s career. Its chord progression, pulled directly from “10538 Overture,” pays homage to the band’s beginnings, while the lyrics are a tribute to Lynne’s own beginnings in Birmingham. Other samples include a children’s choir singing “Frere Jacques” and a voice calling out “‘Spatch and Mail!” like a newspaper caller.