At 18:30 p.m. I arrived at the concert venue. At 18:45 the soundcheck started and at that time there were about 15 fans hanging out there. After two hours (!) the soundcheck finished and I stood by the tour bus to see what I could see and... who did I see walking towards me? It was none other than Yngwie himself! And as much as I hear about Yngwie's bad reputation, he was VERY accessible and a wonderful person: this was my experience. The doors opened at 21:30, everybody rushed in and the anxious crowd awaited his arrival (I got a good place in the first row, right in front of Yngwie). Finally, the show started at 22:30 p.m. (there was not opening act) when the first chords of "Rising Force" began as the crowd went crazy. The venue was pretty full, although it wasn't packed, which is nice. Yngwie's perfomance was as powerful as ever, but I still prefer his show when I last saw him on the "Magnum Opus" tour, featuring Mike Vescera on vocals (that show was better than this one). He performed antics like flipping his guitar up in the air, playing with his tongue and throwing picks out into the crowd the entire night (he must have a lot of them) and people were really fighting for them (I caught one!) He amazed the all time fans as well as the new fans with his performance, playing a full energetic and virtuoso set for a whole two hours.

           

A portion of the set consisted of tunes from the old albums, these songs were: "Rising Force", "Far Beyond The Sun", "The Seventh Sign", "Black Star"... From "War To End All Wars", they played "Crucify", "Bad Reputation", "Catch 22", "Wild One" and "Masquerade". These songs sounded much better than the CD version. The highlights of the night were the instrumentals from the '80s ("Black Star", etc) I'd have liked to see included more songs from "Trilogy" ("You Don't Remember" or "Queen In Love" for example...), but he only played one of the instrumentals ("Trilogy Suite")... Anyway, what a great musician Yngwie is, his fingers fly over the frets. Words simply would not do justice to his playing! Midway through the show, Mark, Yngwie, Mat and Randy left the stage leaving Tim doing a drum solo. Man, this guy is very good on the drums. At the end of the solo, the band was back on stage. Encores: Yngwie played an acoustic solo, "Prelude To April", an acoustic version of "Dreaming" (Yngwie let the crowd sing this song) and the always amazing "Black Star". They finished the show with "IŽll See The Light Tonight", and then threw stuff (drum sticks, more picks...) to the audience thanking people and left. Mark Boals' voice is great (I love his solo album)... too bad his voice was barely hearable some times :( I love Mat Olausson too: first he's really good technically; second, he looks like he's having a lot of fun. While I missed John Macaluso, Tim Donahue did a fine job on the drums, and Randy also did a decent bass solo. A small note if you want to go and see Yngwie in concert: he plays mostly (mostly meaning 99% of the time) on the right part of the stage, so if you want to see him closely, keep that in mind :-) At 12:30 a.m. everybody left the place looking on the floor to see if there was a guitar pick lost. All in all, not a bad show but it could had been a bit better. -Review & photos by Marina-