Photos and review: Trans-Siberian Orchestra at the Pepsi Center in Denver

Live review: Trans-Siberian Orchestra @ the Pepsi Center

By | December 27th, 2011 | 3 comments

Christmas held on a little longer Monday night at Denver’s Pepsi Center. Those in attendance for the holiday concert indulged in a full night of traditional Christmas songs and classical music performed with a unique rock ‘n’ roll treatment that has become a signature of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

The sheer size of the staging created a buzz inside the arena as the crowd filed in. The lights finally went down at 8:15 p.m., and, following the evening’s only moment of silence was a three-hour spectacle of music and theatrics that changed the way many of us listen to classical.

A floor-to-ceiling LED screen transformed the stage from a snowy winter night, to a house with stained glass windows, to a fire-breathing truss monster that gave life to the music that coincided. With electric guitars and violin at the forefront, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra delivered amped-up versions of holiday classics from the Nutcracker Suite, “O Come Al Ye Faithful,” “Wizards in Winter” and their famous rendition of “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo,” to name a few.

There was no downtime during the concert as the cast of performers, who all adopted a unique classical musician-meets-rocker style, each contributed stunning solos and ensemble performances. The 132 tons of “stuff” as former Megadeth and Alice Cooper guitar player Al Pitrelli described it, was put to use late in the set as a catwalk that expanded the width of the arena elevated the TSO guitar players, violinist and dancers above the crowd.

By the time the finale of “Carol of the Bells” approached, the Pepsi Center audience was on full sensory overload. All at once during the final song of the night there was snow falling from the ceiling, smoke billowing from the stage, lazers and pyrotechnics that rivaled any rock ‘n’ roll concert today -— there is a reason the Trans-Siberian Orchestra has been going 27 years strong.

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Paige Montgomery is a Denver-based freelance writer. Check out more of her work on Facebook and Twitter.

Alan Cox is the president/creative director of Cox Creative, a Highlands Ranch-based creative shop. He works too much, sleeps too little and spends every free moment coaching baseball, shooting images and hanging out with his rowdy sons and rowdier wife. Check out his photos here.

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  • SadButTrue

    The worst show I have ever been to.  The ticket was purchased as a gift and I cannot take it back…grrr.

  • Rock1

    Fact Check:
    TSO was started in 1993 NOT “27 yrs ago”
    “132 tons of stuff “  as stated by Pitrelli, equals 264,000 lbs
    Maximum arena rigloads can not be greater than 150 -175,000  lbs. In most venues.
    Perhaps their total production trucking loads are near figure.

    TSO shows have gone downhill since their initial success and novelty thru the 90s. It has become just another rock/ metal concert with diminishing hints of Christmas year after year. Along with the rockstar attitudes onstage the music suffers by trying to be too “bombastic”.
    To qualify this review I have worked over 50 TSO gigs over the years.

  • Michael Passe

    The show was tremendous, although the narration was pretty cornball. This band gave it everything they had, busted their tails to put on a fabulous show, played with skill and energy and versatility. But the audience, that was another story. They apparently expected the Nutcracker with pretty lights, even though just a quick look into the group’s history clearly defines them as “progressive metal.” After watching the blase, jaded yuppie crowd sit on its hands while this band busted its tail for hours, it occurred to me that maybe the oft-discussed zombie apocalypse has begun, only it’s not George Romero-type flesh-eating zombies, it’s just dead people that walk around and do things like go to concerts, the way Romero’s zombies went to the shopping mall without knowing why they were there. Tellingly, the only time people stood up was when the band’s front man did a “salute the troops” thing. Granted, I’ve been to numerous other Denver concerts where the crowd was just as dead as this one. Perhaps this is the result of high ticket prices keeping away the younger kids who might want to actually have fun at a rock concert, the old too-stuck-up-to-have-fun thing. I don’t know, I can’t imagine what more a rock band can do to entertain its audience. Maybe Ozzy Osbourne was right (?!) when he said “Americans bring their coffins with them to the concert.”