When SAVATAGE played the Amphitheatre of Pompeii on July 27 with a full orchestra, we reported the show as the spectacle it plainly was. Guitarist Chris Caffery has now described what it felt like from the inside — and the answer involves rather more chaos than the footage suggests.
Speaking to Moshpit Passion, Caffery laid out everything converging on the band at once. "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."
Playing turned out to be the easy part. "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 most striking detail is how little joint preparation there was. Asked whether the band rehearsed with the orchestra beforehand, Caffery said they never did. "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."
The setlist matched the occasion. Per Setlist.fm, the night opened with "Overture", played for the first time since 1996, and ran through "Dead Winter Dead", "Jesus Saves", "The Wake Of Magellan", "Sirens", "Chance" and an orchestral excerpt of Albinoni's "Adagio In G Minor" performed by bassist Johnny Lee Middleton. "Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)" returned for the first time since 2015 and "Not What You See" for the first time since 1999, before an encore of "Temptation Revelation", "Power Of The Night" and "Hall Of The Mountain King".
The 2026 "Prelude To Madness" tour features vocalist Zak Stevens, guitarists Al Pitrelli and Chris Caffery, bassist Johnny Lee Middleton and drummer Jeff Plate — the latter replaced by Blas Elias for the first two shows for medical reasons. The show was filmed, so a release seems likely.
Source: blabbermouth.net