Chris Caffery says Savatage and their orchestra prepared separately for the Pompeii show and only played together at soundcheck.
Savatage had one night at the Amphitheatre of Pompeii, cameras running, an orchestra behind them and a set built specifically for the occasion. What they did not have was a rehearsal with the musicians they were about to share a stage with.
Chris Caffery explained the arrangement to “Moshpit Passion“. The orchestral parts were written in advance by Al Pitrelli and founding member Jon Oliva, distributed as sheet music, and worked on by each side independently.
“Not with the orchestra with us. They had had the sheet music, and we’d actually had one of the musical directors from TSO [Trans-Siberian Orchestra] went to see them the day before. And [Savatage guitarist and Trans-Siberian Orchestra music director] Al [Pitrelli] and Jon [Oliva] had worked on the arrangements of the string section stuff, and they had had it and they knew what they were gonna play and we knew what they were gonna be playing. So we rehearsed with that in mind in advance. So we were working around it before we saw them, they were working around it before they saw us, and then we basically just had a soundcheck,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Caffery has previously put the orchestra at 40 players, though the venue advertised 27. Either way, the first time the two halves of the performance met was hours before the audience arrived.
He described the build-up to the show as heavy going:
“You get there and you know the setting and you know where you are and you know what you have to do that night, and we were filming. So I think there was an overwhelming amount of things going on at once. We had a lot of friends and fans and press people and business people and everybody that we knew that were showing up too, and then we had the orchestra playing with the band. So there was a extremely large amount of people around that were all experiencing it at once.”
Getting onstage was, by his account, was the easy part:
“I think for me it was a relief to be on the stage because there was so much tension… Not tension, but so much chaos going on. It was creative chaos, so it’s a good chaos, but once you got on stage, you were just able to go do what you did. And then it was fun to just be up there and play in that environment and on that location and live that moment without all the extra chaos around you.”
The July 27 performance ran past two hours and pulled several songs out of long retirement, including “Overture” for the first time since 1996, “Not What You See” for the first time since 1999 and “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)” for the first time since 2015.
According to Setlist.fm, Savatage performed:
- “Overture” (first time since 1996)
- “Mor**ine Child” (instrumental intro only)
- “Dead Winter Dead”
- “Jesus Saves”
- “The Wake Of Magellan”
- “Miles Away”
- “Sirens”
- “Another Way”
- “This Is The Time”
- “Unusual”
- “Chance”
- “Adagio In G Minor” (Tomaso Albinoni & Remo Giazotto cover; excerpt played by Johnny Lee Middleton with orchestra)
- “The Storm”
- “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)” (first time since 2015)
- “Not What You See” (first time since 1999; Zak with orchestra only)
- “Handful Of Rain”
- “Lights Out”
- “Tonight He Grins Again”
- “The Hourglass”
- “Believe”
- “Gutter Ballet”
- “Edge Of Thorns”
Encore:
- “Temptation Revelation”
- “Power Of The Night”
- “Hall Of The Mountain King”
The venue itself dates to roughly 70 BC and was buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD before excavation began centuries later. Pink Floyd filmed there in 1971 with no audience, and since the site reopened to crowds in 2016 it has hosted David Gilmour, Elton John, King Crimson, Dream Theater and Opeth. Marillion played two nights there immediately before Savatage arrived.
Pompeii sits within the “Prelude To Madness” European run, which opened on July 19 in Istanbul and took in first-ever Savatage appearances in Bucharest, Este, Warsaw and Leipzig, with Armored Saint, Vision Divine and Nevermore on selected dates.
The touring lineup is Zak Stevens on vocals, Pitrelli and Caffery on guitars, Johnny Lee Middleton on bass and Jeff Plate on drums. Plate missed the first two shows of the run for medical reasons, with Blas Elias, previously of Slaughter, Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Stephen Pearcy‘s band, covering the Swedish and French festival dates in early June.
