On July 27, SAVATAGE staged one of the most ambitious concerts of its four-decade history, performing at the Amphitheater of Pompeii in Italy — one of the oldest surviving Roman amphitheaters in the world — accompanied live by a 40-piece orchestra.
The progressive metal pioneers treated the Italian crowd to a 25-song main set and encore that spanned almost the entire SAVATAGE catalog. The evening opened with “Overture”, performed live for the first time since 1996, moved through an instrumental introduction to “Morphine Child”, and then landed on “Dead Winter Dead”, “Jesus Saves” and “The Wake Of Magellan”.
Deep cuts were everywhere. “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)” — the piece that ultimately gave birth to TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA — appeared for the first time since 2015, while “Not What You See” was resurrected for the first time since 1999, performed by Zak Stevens with orchestra only. A cover excerpt of “Adagio In G Minor” and a run through “The Storm” underlined just how much of the band's material was conceived with strings in mind.
The back half of the show leaned on the classics: “Handful Of Rain”, “Lights Out”, “Tonight He Grins Again”, “The Hourglass”, “Believe”, “Gutter Ballet” and “Edge Of Thorns”, before “Temptation Revelation”, “Power Of The Night” and a closing “Hall Of The Mountain King”.
Bassist Johnny Lee Middleton admitted that the significance of the booking only sank in gradually. “When they told me Pompeii, I just thought it was the city,” he said. “I didn't know it was the [Amphitheater].” Speaking ahead of the concert about how long the set would run, he added: “It's gonna be over an hour and a half, probably leaning towards the two-hour side, for sure.”
Guitarist Chris Caffery framed the scale of the production plainly: “We have a 40-person orchestra [playing with us], and [it's] gonna be really special. It's an over-two-hour show.”
Pompeii carries obvious weight for heavy music audiences — PINK FLOYD filmed “Live At Pompeii” in the same amphitheater in 1971 — and for a band whose catalog has always straddled heavy metal and full-blown rock opera, the setting could hardly have been better matched to the material. Founder Jon Oliva's compositions have been built around orchestral arrangement for the better part of thirty years; hearing them delivered by an actual orchestra, inside two-thousand-year-old stone walls, is about as close to their intended scale as SAVATAGE has ever come.