Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Winter Tour 2009 December 10, 2009

Sheer Entertainment! Go here: http://www.trans-siberian.com

Trans-Siberian Orchestra was founded in 1996 in New York City by composers Paul O'Neill and Robert Kinkel, and Savatage lead singer Jon Oliva.

O'Neill had managed and produced rock bands including Aerosmith, Humble Pie and Scorpions, later writing for and producing Savatage, where he began working with Kinkel and Oliva. The concept for a band playing Christmas carols in a rock opera style was not received warmly by the industry, but quickly proved a success with adults as well as young people.

In the recording studio, Trans-Siberian Orchestra uses a full 60-piece orchestra and a choir. As of 2004, their touring band included fourteen vocalists, fourteen musicians, and two narrators.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra released their debut album Christmas Eve and Other Stories in 1996, and it remains their best-selling album. Their 1998 release The Christmas Attic was similarly a concept album with a Christmas theme. In 2000, they released their first (and to date only) non-Christmas album, Beethoven's Last Night, a concept album about Ludwig van Beethoven's last night on earth, during which he meets Fate, her son Twist, and Mephistopheles.

After several years of touring, they returned to the studio with another full-length album, Lost Christmas Eve, and the accompanying DVD/3-CD release The Christmas Trilogy, which contained all three of their Christmas albums to date.

With Trans-Siberian Orchestra, first the music is created with no artificial limitations, and then we seek out within the classical, rock, Broadway and R & B worlds, the very best singers and musicians to bring each song to life. This also in many ways forces us to operate on a higher level. This environment has the additional benefit of causing a cross pollenization of musical ideas, creating hybrid forms of music that normally never would have occurred, such as an R&B singer doing a classical style melody and bringing gospel touches to it that causes it to glitter in ways that even the creators could not have predicted. Another very important aspect in the creation of the band, is that there could be no limits on the members; we mix all races and ages.

The young get to mine the experience of the old musicians, while they can't help to be inspired by the enthusiasm of people just entering the business. This has created a vast constantly changing musical group that even we do not know what it is going to do next.

Once when asked what Trans-Siberian Orchestra was about, Paul O'Neill replied, "It's about creating great art. When asked to define what great art was, Paul said, "The purpose of art is to create an emotional response in the person that is exposed to that art. And there are three categories of art; bad art, good art and great art. Bad art will elicit no emotional response in the person that is exposed to it, i.e.; a song you hear in an elevator and it does nothing to you, a picture on a wall that gives you the same emotional response as if the wall had been blank, a movie that chews up time. Good art will make you feel an emotion that you have felt before; you see a picture of a forest and you remember the last time you went fishing with your dad, you hear a song about love and you remember the last time you were in love. Great art will make you feel an emotion you have never felt before; seeing the pieta, the world famous sculpture by

Michelangelo, can cause someone to feel the pain of losing a child even if they've never had one. And when you're trying for these emotions the easiest one to trigger is anger.

Anyone can do it. Go into the street, throw a rock at someone, you will make them angry. The emotions of love, empathy and laughter are much harder to trigger, but since they operate on a deeper level, they bring a much greater reward.

Official Website: http://www.trans-siberian.com