MAGICAL ESCAPE : TSO continues to grow

January 1, 2015 at 12:05a.m.

A holiday tour- ing entity for the past 15 years, Trans-Siberian Orchestra hit a new milestone at the beginning of this year that still confounds band visionary Paul O’Neill.

The outfit kicked off the new year playing before roughly two million German fans at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

“It’s a little bit mind boggling,” said O’Neill in a recent conference call. “I never could have imagined it would’ve gone on and gotten this big. This year’s just been particularly magical. At the Brandenburg Gate, they said it was between 900,000 and a million. And right before we hit the stage, a German stage manager came over and goes, ‘Paul, I think we just crossed two million.’”

He added, “It was surrealistic to look out at that sea of humanity.”

That sea of humanity will be slightly — OK, a lot — smaller when TSO returns to Youngstown on Friday for two shows at Covelli Centre. This tour finds the prog-rock group performing “The Christmas Attic” in its entirety for the first time.

Although the 1998 album features one of the band’s most-popular songs, “Christmas Canon,” oddly enough it’s the one TSO album of the group’s Christmas trilogy — which also include 1996’s “Christmas Eve and Other Stories” and 2004’s “The Lost Christmas Eve” — the outfit never played from beginning to end in concert.

In addition to “The Christmas Attic” material, some of which has never been played live at all, the second half of the show features TSO classics such as “Wizards in Winter,” “Requiem” and “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24.”

In concert, TSO is often compared to Pink Floyd with its high-tech special effects. Now it turns out the outfit will be connected to Michael Jackson.

“When Michael Jackson passed away, PyroTech all of a sudden had 10 lasers they had built that did a really thick blue beam, which is the hardest laser beam to produce,” O’Neill said. “They’re unbelievably expensive, and they were kind of freaked, because they were now stuck with these 10 lasers.

“I’m like, ‘I’ll take all 10.’ Basically, every special-effect company, every pyro company, knows that if they come up with a really great special effect that’s insanely expensive, there’s one band dumb enough to buy it, and that’s us.”

The reason TSO can afford to buy the high-tech gadgetry and effects is because audiences can’t seem to get enough of the band’s holiday tours, as well as its studio material.

Up next for the group are three different projects, including “Romanov: When Kings Must Whisper,” “Letters From the Labyrinth” and “Running in the Passion of the Fairy Tale Moon.”

O’Neill won’t even guess when any or all of the albums will be finished, but he does promise that audiences attending the upcoming tour may hear something from the unreleased efforts. He also promises audiences will leave a TSO show feeling something special.

“You’re going to have a chance to recharge your batteries,” O’Neill said. “No matter what’s going on outside the arena, we’re going to be throwing so many new songs at you, so many new special effects, that the only thing the brain can do is absorb what’s coming at it. While it’s doing that, it can’t be releasing stress hormones, which is so unhealthy.

“So your batteries get a little chance to recharge. In all our rock operas, people run into problems in life, but at the end, there is that happy ending, so if we do our job right, when you leave that arena, you won’t think you’re going to beat any of the problems you bump into in life. You’ll know it.”