DREAM THEATER Guitarist, Keyboardist Talk About Forthcoming Concert DVD

DREAM THEATER’s August 19 and August 20 concerts at Estadio Luna Park in Buenos Aires, Argentina were professionally filmed and recorded for the band’s next live DVD, to be released sometime next year. The setlists for the two concerts were as follows:

Sunday, August 19

01. Bridges In The Sky
02. 6:00
03. The Dark Eternal Night
04. This Is The Life
05. The Root Of All Evil
06. Lost Not Forgotten
07. Drum Solo
08. A Fortune In Lies
09. The Silent Man (with a string quartet)
10. Beneath The Surface (with a string quartet)
11. Outcry
12. Surrounded (preceded by Jordan Rudess’ keyboard solo)
13. On The Backs Of Angels
14. War Inside My Head
15. The Test That Stumped Them All
16. The Spirit Carries On (preceded by John Petrucci’s guitar solo)
17. Breaking All Illusions

Encore:

18. Metropolis Pt. 1: The Miracle And The Sleeper

Monday, August 20

01. Bridges In The Sky
02. These Walls
03. Build Me Up, Break Me Down
04. This Is The Life
05. Caught In A Web
06. Lost Not Forgotten
07. Drum Solo
08. A Fortune In Lies
09. Wait For Sleep (with a string quartet)
10. Far From Heaven (with a string quartet)
11. Outcry
12. Surrounded (preceded by Jordan Rudess’ keyboard solo)
13. On The Backs Of Angels
14. War Inside My Head
15. The Test That Stumped Them All
16. The Spirit Carries On (preceded by John Petrucci’s guitar solo)
17. Breaking All Illusions

Encore:

18. Pull Me Under

Roadrunner Records e-mailed guitarist John Petrucci and keyboardist Jordan Rudess to get their thoughts on these special shows.

Roadrunner Records: You played four songs with a string quartet over the two nights. Who did the arrangements?

Jordan Rudess: All the string parts were written by Eren Basbug, the young and talented Turkish musician that I discovered online through his beautiful orchestrations of DREAM THEATER’s music and then his great work orchestrating and conducting the premiere of my own composition, “Explorations For Keyboard And Orchestra”. For two of the songs we did live with the quartet (“Beneath The Surface” and “Far From Heaven”) I had originally arranged and recorded quartet-like string parts from my keyboard, and that is what you hear on “A Dramatic Turn Of Events”. Eren was able to take those two songs and really make sure what I wrote
worked for real players, as well as add some nice touches! For the other two songs, “The Silent Man” and “Wait For Sleep”, he created original quartet arrangements.

Roadrunner Records: How much rehearsal time did you have with the quartet?

John Petrucci: We played through each song with them a couple of times at soundcheck.
We probably spent about an hour in total making sure they were comfortable and that they knew certain cues, etc.

Jordan Rudess: We had one rehearsal before the first show. I had sent all the music to coordinator Luis Gorelik (who is a well known conductor in South America) and he helped organize the players.

Roadrunner Records: How did their presence alter the way you guys in the band played those
songs? Obviously they weren’t just sawing away in the background; they were integral to the music, so…in what ways?

John Petrucci: Honestly, we played the songs just as we have been and they followed us. On “Beneath The Surface” and “Far From Heaven”, they basically played the arrangements that are on the album. Original arrangements were created for “The Silent Man” and “Wait For Sleep”.

Jordan Rudess: In our rehearsal, I was literally conducting them and we all worked quickly to get things into shape and make sure the players really understood the music and what was going to happen in the chain of events on stage. The good thing was that these four songs all really are totally suitable for real strings, so it was an easy conceptual/musical addition to our presentation.

Roadrunner Records: Other
than the new album (which was played almost in its entirety each night), the albums you played the most material from were “Images And Words”, “Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence” and “Awake”. Why those albums, from your perspective?

John Petrucci: We try to create a show that has a certain curve to it. The way that it begins, unfolds and concludes are all carefully thought about. We have so much material at this point that it’s difficult to fit in songs from each album. Based on what we played on past tours as well as the flow and arc of the show, we thought these were the strongest choices.

Jordan Rudess: There are so many factors that are in play to create a setlist. Generally, we all felt that we offered a night of music that was a well-balanced mixture of our material that not only spanned a lot of our albums but also flowed really well for the course of the evening.

Roadrunner Records: On the second night, you guys played “Pull Me Under” as the encore, which you’ve been playing a lot more on tour this year than in the past few years… but only outside the U.S. Is that a song foreign audiences want to hear more than fans at home?

John Petrucci: “Pull Me Under” always goes over, no matter what country we are in. It just has that kind of power and familiarity, I guess. We really  thought that it sounded great with [new drummer] Mike Mangini playing it and wanted to share that with our listeners.

Jordan Rudess: I don’t know — but I will tell you that they literally were trying to rush the stage in Buenos Aires when we played it. It was nuts!

Source: Roadrunner Records