Trans-Siberian Orchestra Talks About There Upcoming Tour After Sudden Death of Founder Paul O’Neill.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra Talks About There Upcoming Tour After Sudden Death of Founder Paul O’Neill.

Last year’s holiday tour by Trans-Siberian Orchestra may go down as the most important tour ever by the hugely popular combination rock band/orchestra. In April 2017, founder/main songwriter/guiding light Paul O’Neill passed away suddenly.

O’Neill had always intended for TSO to continue after he (and other key members of the TSO team) were gone. That may have been easier said than done, but TSO came through the 2017 tour with flying colors, as O’Neill’s wife, daughter and other core members of the operation (including musical director Al Pitrelli and drummer Jeff Plate) delivered the kind of visually spectacular and musically complex live production fans expected, as the two touring units of TSO filled arenas across the United States from mid-November through the end of the year.

It helped that Pitrelli and Plate, as well O’Neill’s family and members of the TSO crew, had been involved in bringing past holiday tours to life. It’s no small task considering that not only do the musicians have two and a half hours of music to play flawlessly, but TSO employs the biggest array of lighting, pyrotechnics and other special effects of any concert.

Pitrelli admitted there was pressure last year in getting the show ready to go on the road and to run seamlessly as it moved from arena to arena, sometimes with two performances a day. And then there were emotions to navigate.

“I think it was probably one of the hardest years of our professional careers, (for) both Jeff and I and some of the other guys have been with Paul since 1993, ’94. I got started with him in ’95,” Pitrelli said. “I think sorrow and the pain that goes along with losing a loved one was prevalent with everybody, but also I think the task at hand was to say okay, well, Paul had always said ‘We want this thing to live long past all of us.’ I don’t think any of us were prepared for that to occur so soon, but we were kind of handed that task. And with his family steering the ship and their guidance, we kind of really hunkered down last year, even more so than usual, to make it the best it could possibly be.”

“It was really hard to deal with it last year,” he said. “I mean, everything on that stage, every note we played and every pyro hit, was his creation, so he was there with us at all times. And there were a few moments in the show where I really had a difficult time kind of just getting through it because, you know, he was like a big brother, aside from being our boss and our producer and creator of this whole thing. I mean, you know, literally we have spent half of our lives, both Jeff and I, sitting next to the man in studios and on tour buses. And then to be out there, and you can’t get it out of your head that he’s gone because everything around you he created.”

Now TSO is back for this year’s holiday tour, and Pitrelli and Plate are excited to get this year’s show on the road and continue honoring O’Neill’s work. Like last year’s outing, the first set of the show will feature a performance of 1999’s, “The Ghosts of Christmas Eve,” one of TSO’s four full-length holiday albums. “Christmas Eve and Other Stories” (1996), “The Christmas Attic” (1998) and “The Lost Christmas Eve” (2004) — the albums that formed a Christmas trilogy — are the others. “The Ghosts of Christmas Eve” made its debut as the centerpiece of TSO’s holiday concerts in 2016 – O’Neill’s final holiday tour with TSO — and the response to that opera made it obvious that it should return for a third year.

“When Paul put this show together (for the 2016 tour), he absolutely loved it, and it was one of his favorite shows,” Plate said. “Paul was extremely excited about it. The response to the show, and everything just seemed to have gone according to plan. It couldn’t have gone better. So I think, when we lost Paul, doing this show again was just a great way to honor Paul.

“We’ve also realized, too, that a lot of audience sees us for the first time every year,” he added. “And if you’ve ever seen TSO, you know every year we go out there with different production and the show itself is always going to be different, but the (“The Ghosts of Christmas Eve”) show has just gone over extremely well.”

Both Pitrelli and Plate are seeking to follow O’Neill’s lead in their roles with TSO and they talked of O’Neill’s remarkable attention to detail with the live show, down to making sure every light flashed the right color at the right time.

“I mean, people can’t understand how insanely dedicated Paul was to this and how much he really just put every ounce of energy into every little detail that goes on the stage,” Plate said. “For me it was like, I have to go out there and be perfect every night. This is my goal and just carrying that on. Just treat this thing like this is gold.”

When O’Neill passed, he left behind a wealth of material. Pitrelli and other members of the TSO team are now starting to finish what O’Neill started, hoping to add to an album catalog that, in addition to the Christmas albums, includes three non-holiday rock operas – “Beethoven’s Last Night” (2000), “Night Castle” (2009) and “Letters from the Labyrinth” (2015).

“There was a lot of material that Paul had written with his partner Jon Oliva, also stuff that Paul had written by himself and things that he had written with his daughter. There’s just so much material that hasn’t been recorded yet,” Pitrelli said. “We’ve been doing a lot of demos, a lot of maps, having some singers down, and there’s plenty of stuff taking shape, no releases in mind yet, nothing like that. I think the process, just to get back and start recording and start working on some of this material, I’m really glad that it’s starting to happen. And it’s exciting to see some of these things come to life. I mean, there are songs that we’ve been talking about for 15 years that now it’s like, OK, now they’re going to see the light of day.”

Pitrelli said as he moves forward with TSO, he’s learned an important lesson from how O’Neill approach life — that time is the most valuable commodity there is and it should not be wasted.

“As we learned tragically over the last couple years, you know, time is way too precious to squander. You can never get yesterday back,” he said. “So I’ve learned to live in the moment and enjoy every second of this.

“I want to make sure today was the best day I could have made it,” Pitrelli elaborated. “That could be musically, or emotionally, or being a good dad, a good husband, all those kinds of things. I learned that from Paul O’Neill, because every day was an event with Paul, whether we were going out to dinner, whether we were recording in the studio, whether we were just talking about stuff, it was the best day of our lives spent together. And I was blessed to have a lot of those days with him.”

You Can Buy Your Trans-Siberian Orchestra ” A Christmas Trilogy” CD Here. What a wonderful gift for the Holidays.