A & E

Trans-Siberian Orchestra founder Paul O'Neill says this Christmas season started off looking like the bucket of soot promised to bad little boys.

Jobs disappearing. Gasoline gurgling around $4 a gallon. Every price in every market flying higher than Santa's reindeer. Not the kind of year to spend money on a concert.

"But ticket sales are up six figures over last year," he says. "I saw gas the other day at $1.85 a gallon. It's time to be thankful."

With 2008 taking on a more festive air, O'Neill and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra will swing into the Mellon Arena, Uptown, on Wednesday for what has become an annual Pittsburgh stop.

It is a visit that has grown steadily from its first stop in 2001 at the Byham Theater, Downtown, to the current staging of two concerts in one day at the arena.

It also is a Christmas visit that thrives on its gifts of fireworks, lights and overwhelming sound.

"We spend $2 million on pyrotechnics every four weeks," O'Neill says of the tour that will appear in 90 cities for 140 shows. To do that, there are two editions of the band roaming the continent.

O'Neill says the cost of the whole tour is somewhere around $30 million and that the show is "twice as big" as the one in 2007, which increased an equal size over the prior year's.

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra presents what has been called "symphonic rock" in a Christmas setting. Besides a six-person rock band, there is a string section and choir that offer classic holiday music and the new material the band created for is three seasonal albums.

Besides that, the show also features rousing covers of rock classics as well as rock covers of classical works by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Prokofiev.

The success of this hardly traditional effort shows in its numbers:

• The band drew 1.2 million audience members in 2007.

• It has sold more that 6 million CDs since its founding in 1996 and has played to 4.5 million people since the first tour in 1999.

• The band's "Ghosts of Christmas Eve" TV special has been shown in more than 120 Public Broadcasting Service markets and has sold more than 100,000 copies on DVD.

While the band has released other albums, it is known for its holiday tours -- its only time on the road.

That could be coming to a close, O'Neill admits. The concert will open this year with the song "The Night Enchanted" from its "Nightcastles" albums, which is due out in the spring.

That could lead to a 12- to 14-month tour of this continent, Europe and Asia, he says, which could interfere with next year's holiday tour. Or the two concerts might somehow be blended together, he says.

He is proud of the success the band has had in its Christmas show. Holiday shows present great demands from the audience, and meeting those demands is a great accomplishment, he says.

"Christmas shows are the Holy Grail of touring," he says.

• Most Read
• Most E-mailed
• Latest News