What do Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, Orff’s Carmina Burana, and Weber’s Der Freischütz have in common? All are deliciously spooky excursions into the musical supernatural, eternally popular with classical audiences eager to experience a good scare within the relative safety of respectable art music.
The febrile world of enchantment and witchery has always appealed to composers, and the range of works featuring goblins and grim reapers, witches, devils, and necromancers is vast. In the perfect run-up to Halloween, popular speaker and concert pianist Rachel Franklin returns to her hair-raising tour of some of the best-loved classical music haunts, showcasing works by Berlioz, Dukas, Liszt, Schubert, Saint-Saens, Caplet, Stravinsky, and many others.
October 24 Haunted Classics
Who needs creepy movies when classical music can frighten the life out of us? From the bizarre to the bloodcurdling, composers have relished the opportunity to conjure witchcraft and magic in the opera house and with the symphony orchestra. Other-worldly works by Franz Schubert, Giuseppe Verdi, Manuel de Falla, Antonin Dvorák, Paul Dukas, Sergei Rachmaninoff and others will materialize.
October 31 The Scariest of them All
We summon the dark spirits for All Hallows Eve! Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, and André Caplet’s The Masque of the Red Death are among the bone chillers that set the stage for a suitably spine-tingling Halloween.
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