Savatage - Dead Winter Dead
On October 24, 1995, "Dead Winter Dead", the ninth studio album by the band "Savatage", was released.
The mid-1990s presented the American progressive and power metal band "Savatage" with the most difficult and painful test of survival in its history. In October 1993, just months after the release of the successful masterpiece "Edge of Thorns", the great guitarist and co-founder Criss Oliva was killed in a tragic car accident caused by a drunk driver in Florida. For his older brother and creative partner Jon Oliva, the blow was fatal, but out of the heavy grief, Oliva and the producer, lyricist and conceptual mastermind behind the band Paul O'Neill came to the decision not to let his brother's legacy fade. In 1994, the band released the charged album "Handful of Rain", on which Jon Oliva played almost all the instruments in the studio alongside charismatic vocalist Zachary Stevens and the great guitarist of the band "Testament", the virtuoso Alex Skolnick.
With the end of the tour for that album, documented on the live album "Japan Live '94", Alex Skolnick decided to part ways with the band on good terms to focus on jazz and fusion projects. Towards 1995, Jon Oliva and Paul O'Neill decided to rebuild "Savatage" as a full, powerful and wide-ranging lineup, capable of realizing their most ambitious vision since the monumental rock opera "Streets: A Rock Opera" from 1991. Veteran bassist Johnny Lee Middleton, energetic drummer Jeff Plate and vocalist Zachary Stevens were joined by two leading guitarists who together created a deadly and versatile duo. The first was Chris Caffery, who had already accompanied the band on the "Gutter Ballet" album tour and collaborated with Jon Oliva on the heavy side project "Doctor Butcher", and the second was New York guitar virtuoso Al Pitrelli, who had gained a rich reputation for his work with Alice Cooper and the band "Asia", and later joined the band "Megadeth". At the same time, Jon Oliva himself officially returned to the forefront of the studio, not only as a writer, keyboardist and co-producer, but also as a lead vocalist sharing the microphone on duets and selected songs alongside Stevens.
In June 1995, the new band, along with keyboardist and regular arranger Robert Kinkel, gathered at Soundtrack Studios and Studio 900 in New York. Rather than opt for a fantastical or abstract subject, O'Neill decided to look directly at one of the bloodiest human tragedies that were taking place in those days right on European soil, the Bosnian War and the brutal siege of the city of Sarajevo. Thus was born "Dead Winter Dead", a symphonic, dark and moving concept album that tells a heartbreaking human story from the perspective of three heroes whose fates are intertwined in the heart of the inferno.
The story opens through the eyes of an ancient stone gargoyle that has stood for a thousand years atop the bell tower of a medieval church in the center of Sarajevo, a figure immortalized on the chilling album cover by artist Edgar Jerins. The gargoyle, who has watched humanity through centuries of wars and beliefs but has never been able to understand the meaning of human emotion and tears, watches the city fall to pieces. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in 1990, a hopeful young Serbian named Serdjan Aleskovic dreams of a future of freedom, but is soon drawn into the bloody civil war and finds himself in a Serbian artillery unit shelling the city from the hills. On the other hand, a young Bosnian Muslim named Katrina Brasic purchases weapons from cynical arms dealers and sets out to defend her besieged city.
In the heart of the ruins and the infernal fire, an elderly musician who has returned to his bloody homeland stands every evening in the square of the ruined city, takes out his cello and plays works by Mozart and Beethoven amidst the whistling of shells. The character of the old man was inspired by the true and moving story of Vedran Smailović, the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera, who played for twenty-two consecutive days in the ruins of the city in memory of twenty-two civilians who were killed in a bread line. Every evening, Serdjan and Katrina listen from their opposing positions to the sounds of the cello rising from the square. On Christmas Eve, December 24, while the cellist is playing an ancient holiday tune, a mortar shell lands in the square and silences the music. They both abandon their positions, run into the snow, and arrive at the square at that moment, where they find the old man lying lifeless next to his shattered cello, as the gargoyle above them sheds a human tear for the first time. Shocked and recognizing the shared humanity beyond the uniforms, the two throw down their weapons and flee Sarajevo together into the night.
The musical journey opens with the orchestral instrumental section "Overture" leading directly into "Sarajevo", a dark and dramatic atmospheric song in which Zachary Stevens' warm and deep voice depicts the ancient city sinking into fog and war. Immediately after it erupts "This Is the Time", a majestic progressive-metal work that opens with a melancholic piano and develops into heavy riffs and magnificent melodic solos by Al Pitrelli and Chris Caffery, depicting the fragile optimism of 1990 just before the storm breaks.
The tone becomes rough, aggressive and menacing as Jon Oliva takes over as lead singer on the songs "I Am" and "Doesn't Matter Anyway". With his husky, cutting and theatrical voice, Jon Oliva embodies the cynical arms dealer who feeds on hatred and sells death to the highest bidder, reminding his clients that wars end but it's always worth stocking up for the next one. The combination of Pitrelli and Caffery's sawing riffs and Oliva's demonic delivery takes the listener straight back to the glory days of "Hall of the Mountain King."
The album's emotional dynamics continue to intensify in the dark ballad "Starlight", where Stevens's lead vocal blends with Jon Oliva's backing vocals
on a mesmerizing acoustic and piano background, and in the complex song "This Isn't What We Meant", which cries out the broken dream of an entire generation that sought freedom and received destruction. The middle part of the album presents two breathtaking virtuoso instrumental sections, "Mozart and Madness" which skillfully blends Mozart's Twenty-fifth Symphony into a progressive-metal storm full of changes of meter by Jeff Plate and Johnny Lee Middleton, and immediately follows "Memory", an electric and somber arrangement of the Ode to Joy motif from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, leading to the heavy and dramatic title song "Dead Winter Dead".
One of the emotional highs of the album and of "Savatage"'s entire career comes in the chilling work "One Child". Written from the perspective of Serdjan, who is tormented by the deaths of innocent children in shelling, the song opens with gentle piano playing and Stevens's bare, painful vocals, and gradually builds to an operatic climax with polyphonic counterpoint and Pitrelli's weeping guitar solo. The song was accompanied by a moving official music video that illustrated the horrors of war through the eyes of a child.
Then, on the twelfth track, comes the moment that forever changed the lives of the band members and the face of world symphonic rock, the instrumental piece "Christmas Eve Sarajevo 12/24". In a work lasting just three minutes and twenty-four seconds, based on existing Christmas melodies and credited to Jon Oliva, Paul O'Neill and Robert Kinkel, with cello performed by Mary Wooten
, the band combined the old English Christmas carol "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" with the Ukrainian tune "Carol of the Bells". The piece opens with a lonely, melancholic cello in the heart of the calm before the storm, before the distorted guitars, piano and drums erupt in a massive metal symphony that simulates the shells landing on the city. Radio stations in the United States, which were initially hesitant to play a heavy metal band's song, were inundated with requests from excited listeners in December 1995, and the song became a huge hit that crossed all genre boundaries. Its phenomenal success led O'Neill, Jon Oliva, and Kinkel to form the megaproject "Trans-Siberian Orchestra" in 1996, which re-released the song on its debut album and went on to sell over ten million albums and fill stadiums across North America.
The album is sealed by the epic piece "Not What You See", in which Serdjan and Katrina come face to face over the old cellist's body. Here the band displays in full glory their unique trademark, Broadway-style counterpoint singing in which several different voices and melodies run in parallel and merge into a celestial harmony, before the album fades to a lone, final cello sound echoing in space.
Upon its release, "Dead Winter Dead" received rave reviews in leading metal and rock magazines in Europe, Japan, and the United States, and was later reissued in lavish editions that included soulful acoustic versions of Criss Oliva-era classics like "All That I Bleed" and "When the Crowds Are Gone". In the test of time, "Dead Winter Dead" stands not only as one of the pinnacles of "Savatage"'s work alongside "Streets: A Rock Opera" and "The Wake of Magellan", but as a one-of-a-kind historical bridge that demonstrated how heavy rock, classical music, and a poignant human story can merge into a timeless work of art.
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