Avantasia

Using a huge ensemble of musicians to create fantastical concept albums and jaw-dropping stage shows, Avantasia is a symphonic rock opera dreamed up by Edguy front man Tobias Sammet featuring a revolving cast of metal legends including Alice Cooper, Dee Snyder and Biff Byford.

Growing up in the small city of Fulda, near Frankfurt in the centre of Germany, Sammet formed Edguy with a group of high school friends in 1992 and gradually established the band as passionate, classic metal loyalists with a love of spectacular theatricality on breakthrough albums 'Vain Glory Opera' and 'Theater of Salvation'. By 1999, though, Sammet was crafting the idea of a concept album based around the story of a Dominican monk's spiritual journey to save his sister from a maniacal Pope in a fantasy world of elves, serpents and hexes. It resulted in the albums 'The Metal Opera Part One' in 2001 and 'The Metal Opera Part Two' in 2002, which were a wild, bombastic, choral mix of 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody', featuring guest vocalists Michael Kiske from Helloween, Sharon den Adel of Within Temptation and Andre Matos of Symfonia.

The project was revived again in 2006 with Sammet's Edguy bandmate Sascha Paeth becoming a key contributor, and they fulfilled a long-held ambition by recruiting Alice Cooper to play the role of the Toy Master on third album 'The Scarecrow'. They also worked with KISS drummer Eric Singer, Magnum front man Bob Catley and keyboard player Miro on a series of albums known as 'The Wicked Trilogy' and their live shows grew into three-hour extravaganzas which they took on tours across the world. Biff Byford from Saxon and Joe Lynn Turner were other big names to appear on later album 'The Mystery of Time' in 2013 and they made an unlikely attempt to enter the Eurovision Song Contest as Germany's representatives in 2016, but finished third in a competition decided by the public. Always huge in scale and ambition and orchestral and bombastic in sound, they returned again with seventh album 'Ghostlights' and a new Avantasia opus called 'Moonglow' arrived in 2019, featuring contributions from Candice Night, Ronnie Atkins and Jorn Lande.