I got back too late Sunday night to post about the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert and ended up working very long days Monday and Tuesday, so the report waits until Wednesday...
What an incredible experience! These folks know how to put on a show. The light-show, while not the most whiz-bang light show I've ever seen, did greatly impress me and the music was as good, if not better in some cases, than that on the albums.
I had wondered how this concert would be presented. There are four albums of material to choose from and most of the albums are really more concept albums--meant to be played together and in order--than collections of separate songs. How they did it actually worked fairly well.
The first half of the concert was an abridged version of Christmas Eve and Other Stories. I say abridged because most of the choral pieces were not performed (such as "A Star to Follow"). I assume these pieces weren't performed because there wasn't actually a choir. This wasn't really a problem however. The album was performed as a single entity. The "narration" was expanded with a spoken (not sung) narrator going more in depth than on the album itself. Crowd-pleasers were "O Come All Ye Faithful/O Holy Night", "A Mad Russian's Christmas", "This Christmas Day" and, of course, "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24".
After a very brief intermission including introductions of the band members and touring group, the concert became a little more muddled. They jumped right back into things playing assorted pieces from the other albums and promised a few pieces from a forthcoming album whose title I didn't catch. This part of the concert didn't flow as well and some attempts at humor were a little awkward (including one of the band members showing up on stage in a cow costume). There were a few awkward pieces performed as well, such as a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll".
But the last third of the concert made up for the weak middle section. It started out with a "play-off" between the band's two keyboardists (both of whom are absolutely incredible)--each trying to play more difficult pieces that the one before. This was actually very entertaining and humorous and included things like a Trans-Siberian Orchestra rendition of "Linus and Lucy".
What I found incredible though was a new piece that I can only assume will be on this forthcoming album. "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi" from Carmina Burana done in the style of TSO. Oh. Wow. Shivers kept rolling up and down during that one. Other crowd-pleasers were "Requiem" from Beethoven's Last Night and "Christmas Canon Rock" from The Lost Christmas Eve.
The Grand Finale really was just that: Grand. It consisted of a medley of various pieces all done in great TSO style, lights, fireworks, musicians wandering amongst the audience playing they instruments, and culminating in a reprise of "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24" that was perhaps more powerful than the original.
Again, TSO really knows how to put on a show. They make a stop in Omaha every year for the last several years and I will definitely be back to see them again next year.
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