Last year, after witnessing the spectacle that is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Christmas show, guitarist/singer Greg Lake (of Emerson Lake & Palmer fame) had one simple question for Paul O’Neill, founder of TSO: “Paul, how are you going to beat this next year?”

O’Neill, in a late October phone interview, said he had a realistic answer for Lake: “Greg, I have no fucking idea.’”

Still, O’Neill is hoping that the 2007 edition of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra will top last year’s model. His combination rock band/orchestra — which plays amongst a dazzling collection of lighting and special effects — will arrive at the Conseco Fieldhouse near the close of its eight-week holiday tour.

“It’s getting harder and harder as time goes on to impress not just adults, but even kids,” O’Neill says. “Kids these days have Halo and all these video games [and] digital TV. Not only kids, but adults, demand so much more input per 60 seconds.”

Each year, the TSO set is rebuilt and revamped, and the special effects arsenal is changed and kicked up a notch. The musical program, though, won’t be radically different on this year’s tour. As in 2005 and 2006, the first half of the show will feature the music from the 1996 CD Christmas Eve & Other Stories.

That CD was the first of a holiday trilogy that also includes 1998’s The Christmas Attic and 2004’s The Lost Christmas Eve. As in past years, the second half of the set features songs from those two holiday releases, as well as TSO’s non-holiday rock opera, 2003’s Beethoven’s Last Night and a long-delayed new CD, The Nightcastle, which O’Neill says he hopes to release this summer.

“The great thing about it is every year, when the audience comes back, it’s a totally new look that doesn’t allow the eye to get bored,” O’Neill says. “And then with Christmas Eve & Other Stories being the first half of the rock opera, they get the comfort of the familiar as they’re settling in, so they have a little something different and a little something the same.”