Photo by Jason McEacher
Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Trans-Siberian Orchestra is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its rock opera The Last Christmas Eve this holiday season on a tour that marks having sold 20 million tickets, and in doing so, surpassed more than $20 million in donations to charity. They will perform on Sunday, Dec. 22 at Fiserv Forum.
Those numbers—20 million tickets sold in 20 years—would seem to be impossible for a production that tours for just two months of the year.
But TSO has a secret weapon. Make that two not-so-secret weapons. “I think the first thing is, most people don't realize we have two different touring groups,” said TSO music director and lead guitarist Al Pitrelli in a late-September interview. “There's a West Coast and East Coast group. So when you look at that schedule, it’s literally impossible for one band to cover all that.
“We’ve been doing this with two bands ever since the year 2000, but we play to roughly 1 million people a year between the two groups,” he said. “Along with that, is the charity, the dollar per ticket.”
Lavish Productions
TSO is now known for its lavish productions that bring a rock show complete with pyro and lasers together with the performance of music and story written by TSO’s late founder Paul O’Neill.
For Pitrelli, TSO grew up out of a single song the group recorded for its debut album, Christmas Eve and Other Stories. “It'll be 30 years ago this coming February or March when I first started working with (drummer) Jeff (Plate), the guys in (the band) Savatage and Paul,” Pitrelli said. “When Paul first put the faders up on Christmas Eve/Sarajevo, 12/24, I knew that there was something (different than) a lot of people artistically that he was going after, than what would have been maybe the norm in that era. And I knew people would be drawn to it.”
Plate had the same feeling during the sessions for Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24. “When we recorded this song, there was no denying when you heard it, it was fantastic,” said Plate, who joined Pitrelli for the interview. “You hadn't heard anything like it. Christmas music up to that point had been relatively safe. Even if a rock band was doing a Christmas song, they really sugared it up quite a bit. There wasn’t much of an edge to it. That song certainly had an edge.”
Platinum Albums, Massive Tours
Christmas Eve and Other Stories (featuring Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24) went platinum. So did 1998’s The Christmas Attic, setting the table for TSO’s groundbreaking holiday tours.
“I've always thought when we started touring back in 1999, the curiosity of people that come to see the band was one thing,” Plate said. “But I think once they got in the room it’s the story, it’s the lyrics, it's the songs. I think Paul’s story is the star of the show.”
The first couple TSO tours were far from the massive undertakings that now find about 40 semi-trucks and buses rolling out of Council Bluffs, Iowa each November as the two bands hit the road.
Photo by Jason McEacher
Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Trans-Siberian Orchestra
“We started in ‘99, Jeff and I,” Pitrelli said. “It was one band back then. We had one box truck, a bus and a fog machine, and Paul had a saying ‘Put everything back into the show, make it bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.’ We always want to surprise the repeat offenders, and the folks who are coming for the first time have no idea what to expect anyway. We absolutely want to keep them on their heels as well.”
Holiday Tradition
Now TSO, with its stories and music, has become a holiday tradition for the thousands who come to the shows each year TSO plays their city. It’s also a tradition for Pitrelli and Plate.
“It has become, like ‘It's a Wonderful Life’ or in my case, ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas.’ where I want that comfort of the familiarity of my holiday tradition to remind myself,” Pitrelli said. “But to be honest, becoming families’ holiday tradition was never on my radar.”
That, he said, began to be clear before the COVID-19 pandemic. But in 2020 TSO learned just how much it meant to fans who wanted to keep their holiday traditions alive. “When we had to cancel our tour and the only thing we had to do was live streaming, we didn’t really know too much about what was going on with that,” Pitrelli said.
“We played one show that year, which was a gift for us,” he said. “When we found that 250,000 homes purchased that live stream because they wanted to spend the holidays with their favorite band celebrating that story again, that’s when I said, ‘you know what, this is a lot bigger than I thought it was.’”
