Last year, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra was forced to cancel their annual signing project – the America’s Arena Holiday Tour that typically draws over a million fans.

To help fill the void, the TSO team hosted a live concert. Scaling the show from an arena where TSO deploys a spectacular light show and all manner of pyrotechnics and special effects on something that works on a TV or computer screen was a challenge, but the livestream, which featured the 1996 album “Christmas Eve and Other Stories”, went well.

In a way, the livestream brought TSO back to its early days, before founder / songwriter, the late Paul O’Neill, was financially able to create the visual concert extravaganza that fans now know and love. The livestream also revealed an important truth to Al Pitrelli and Jeff Plate, the musical directors of TSO’s two touring groups.

“If you go back to our first show in 1999, Jeff and I, I think we had, I don’t know, seven or eight cities on the tour,” Pitrelli said in a teleconference interview shortly before the rehearsals of this year’s tour. has begun. “We had a box truck, two buses and a fog machine. The curtain went up, the lights went out and we played the songs up and down. It wasn’t the sensory overload that he grew up to be. It was a beautifully written story that Paul O’Neill wrote in ’95, and we started recording in ’96. People fell in love with the characters. They fell in love with the story. They fell in love with this feeling. Because at the end of the day, at the center of Paul’s story, there is someone missing, and everyone misses someone, especially during the holidays.

“I think during the livestream it showed me, in particular, two things,” he said. “One is that people love history. There weren’t all the special effects. There is no physical way to do this. But the group performed wonderfully. The singers brought the characters to life. I heard after the fact that we had sold almost 250,000 of these things. From a financial standpoint, I don’t care. It didn’t matter to me. What really moved me was that people wanted their tradition. Although virtually, we were all there.

Now, Pitrelli and Plate are bringing TSO’s two touring sets to arenas across the country, including two shows at the Enterprise Center in St. Louis on December 30. It will be different from the time before people heard about COVID, but the protocols involved in taking the dozens of musicians and crew from each company on tour don’t dampen the enthusiasm to be back. on stage or the willingness to take all necessary COVID precautions along the way.

“I think I could speak for Jeff on this one by saying we’ll show up in hazmat suits and play,” Pitrelli said. “We are like caged animals chomping at the bit. Don’t do what we’ve been doing for 20 years something, got that taken away last year, you love something so much, once you got it back in your hands you love it, cherish it, so protects Suite. So I just want to put a guitar around my shoulders and stand out in the center of the stage and say, “Let’s go. “

And 25 years into TSO’s history as a recording artist, Pitrelli and Plate know fans are ready to see TSO in person again, but they’re also as surprised and gratified as anyone by TSO’s success. . After all, when O’Neill founded the project, he envisioned something new and unproven in contemporary music.

On the one hand, TSO would combine a rock band with an orchestra playing concept albums / rock operas with cohesive stories. It was an O’Neill genre, which died in 2017, called rock theater. Instead of building an image around a singer, guitarist or conductor, the ensemble would use multiple singers and a range of instrumentalists who would remain largely anonymous to listeners. How to market the group was a big question.

Many people in the industry have questioned whether TSO can be financially viable. O’Neill took a meticulous approach to creating albums, seeking out the perfect singers to express the characters in his lyrical stories and bringing in the types of instrumentalists his music needed – steps that widened the deadlines and budgets of his music. ‘registration. When it comes to touring, taking such an important musical group on the road with the kind of high-tech visual spectacle O’Neill envisioned would also be expensive. The band would need to play in arenas from the start – something no band had done.

Nonetheless, Atlantic Records adheres to O’Neill’s vision and signs TSO. The label has been honored as the Christmas album trilogy has grown into hits that continue to rack up new sales with each holiday season.

The first release was 1996’s “Christmas Eve and Other Stories”. Spurred on by the hit single “Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24”, it sold 3 million copies and set the stage for the other two operas. Holiday rock songs that make up TSO’s Christmas trilogy – “The Christmas Attic” (1998) and “The Lost Christmas Eve” (2004) – each of which has sold over 2 million copies. In addition, the band released a Christmas EP, “Dreams of Fireflies (On A Christmas Night)” in 2012, and three full non-holiday rock operas – “Beethoven’s Last Night” (2000), “Night Castle” (2009) and “Letters from the Labyrinth” (2015). In total, the group’s CDs and DVDs sold over 12 million copies and generated 170 million streams in 2020 alone.

The group’s annual Christmas hike is by far the most popular holiday tour. Since its debut in 1999, the Holiday Tours have performed in front of more than 15 million fans and grossed $ 700 million.

“It’s just amazing to be on stage all these years later after all the doubts and questions and everything around this thing when it started,” said Plate, who joined Pitrelli for the interview via teleconference. “Being able to do this all these years later with millions of people on board with you every year is something that we have become a tradition. It’s a pretty heavy thing to say. But I think the last year really showed that with the number of people showing up for the livestream, but how upset people were that we weren’t shooting, not just the fans but the members of the group, everyone involved.

This year, as in 2019, TSO will perform the album “Christmas Eve and Other Stories” in a first set, followed by a selection of other tracks in the second set. This 1996 debut album was played for a dozen years when TSO first began touring, and was then set aside to feature the other Christmas trilogy albums on subsequent tours. Bringing back the album that started TSO’s journey was special for Pitrelli and Plate and they are excited to be playing “Christmas Eve and Other Stories” again this year.

“Yeah, it’s my favorite show,” Plate said. “I’ve always said it, I think this story is really the star of the show. This is what has continued to bring people back every year is when people connected with the story and realized it was about them. It’s about everyone. This is how people, just word of mouth, kept coming back. These audiences kept growing every year. It was (was) our first adventure with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, “Christmas Eve and Other Stories”, so that makes a lot of sense. It’s very special for all of us. The songs, the story, (everything) about it, I think it’s fantastic.