Trans-Siberian Orchestra resurrects earlier holiday work for new show

Trans-Siberian Orchestra is throwing a bit of a curveball at its fans with this year's edition of its popular holiday tour.

For the first time since the combination rock group/orchestra began doing its annual Christmas tours, it is not featuring one of the albums from its popular Christmas trilogy — the 1996 release “Christmas Eve and Other Stories,” “The Christmas Attic” (1998) and “The Lost Christmas Eve” (2004).

Instead, TSO will perform its one Christmas work that never made it to CD — and never has been performed live on tour — “The Ghosts of Christmas Eve.”

“I’ve always liked it,” TSO founder Paul O’Neill said in a late-October teleconference interview with a group of reporters. “It’s a little gem.”

Last year, “The Christmas Attic” became the last of the Christmas trilogy albums to be featured on the holiday tour. With the 20th anniversary of “Christmas Eve and Other Stories” looming for 2016, this fall became an ideal time to step away from the trilogy.

The “Ghosts of Christmas Eve” project came about in 1999 quickly and quite unexpectedly.

“We got a call from Fox, who had a small, I think, one-hour, mini-movie drop-out on Dec. 2,” O’Neill said. “They asked us if they could film the band for an hour doing ‘Beethoven’s Last Night,’ which we had just completed. I said, ‘If you give me an hour, I’ll give you a mini-movie.’ … I just quickly scripted together this little thing, where a 15-year-old ends up breaking into this old vaudeville theater. She’s a runaway. There, she’s discovered by the caretaker, who uses the ghosts and the spirits from the theater to turn her life around. Thank God, Fox liked it.

“It was only supposed to run once and never again, but it did so well, Fox ran it multiple times,” he said. “Then it’s basically run on various stations ever since. The DVD has gone multiplatinum.”

Since “The Ghosts of Christmas Eve” aired, TSO has gone on to become a major success, with “Christmas Eve and Other Stories,” a triple-platinum hit, leading the way. Its annual Christmas tour, meanwhile, is a reliable blockbuster, earning $51 million last year.

O’Neill’s studio work, though, has shifted to long-planned nonholiday projects.

The second of the nonholiday rock operas, “The Night Castle,” arrived — after several delays — in 2009.

Now the group has released “Letters From the Labyrinth.” The project took a major turn this past summer after TSO played Germany’s Wacken Festival.

While there, O’Neill met a pair of Sunni Muslims and another pair of concertgoers who were Shiite Muslims. The two pairs of men had been involved in the Syrian civil war. O’Neill’s encounter prompted him to write “Forget the Blame,” which turned into a duet between vocalists Robin Borneman and Lzzy Hale (of the hard rock band Halestorm).

“I would like to believe, that if God forbid, in two years if these four young men, who are in two separate militias, met in combat in Syria in that horrible civil war, that if they recognize each other that not only would they not pull the trigger, I think they would actually un-chamber their weapons,” O’Neill said. “… It’s hard to hate someone, let alone shoot them, that you’ve gone to a concert with. That is the magic of music.”

O’Neill found himself stepping away from building “Letters From the Labyrinth” around a single rock opera format and instead treating each song as its own short story.

O’Neill said perhaps a half-dozen songs from “Letters From the Labyrinth” will find their way into the set list this year. (The group has usually included some nonholiday material in its catalog-spanning second set of the show.)

The show will again deliver what is arguably the biggest visual spectacle of any concert, featuring all manner of lights, lasers and pyrotechnics to go with the music.

“The bottom line is, it’s all about the audience, to take everybody in that arena on a journey of their imagination where they’re not in that arena,” he said. “They escaped and they feel emotions they never felt before. They leave that building recharged. Our biggest fear right now is that we never drop the ball.”