Halloween concerts: Orchestras bring spooky classics to life

‘Tense! Tense! This is horror. It needs to be really edgy… Yeeees!” Conductor Risto Joost is cheering on the musicians of the North Netherlands Orchestra. The violins must be even more vicious, he just said. And they already sounded eerie, laid so close to bridge, with the fingers of the left hand sliding over the strings. A bit like dozens of nails slowly scratching across a chalkboard.

Orchestras love annual festive concerts. We are familiar with Christmas concerts, and of course also just before Easter concerts (hello again Matthäus), liberation and sometimes Ketikoti concerts have also been in vogue for some time. But newer annual theme concerts also seem to be becoming a permanent fixture: Valentine’s concerts, among others, and like this week: Halloween concerts. Horror in the concert hall.

The Hague Residentie Orchestra, for example, accompanies the film live in Paard Nosferatu (1922). The North Netherlands Orchestra will play a concert with the title on Friday Halloween: Horror and Orchestral Nightmares − a mix of ‘scary’ classics such as Saint-Saëns’ Danse MacabreMussorgskys Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken legsbut also Penderecki’s Polymorphia and some film music, such as Morricone’s well-known music The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

And that is what the NNO will rehearse on Tuesday morning, strongly encouraged by conductor Risto Joost in the De Oosterpoort concert hall in Groningen. The concentration of the musicians is high, and for a first rehearsal the orchestra sounds impressively warm and atmospheric.

“Very exciting music,” says NNO cellist Isabel Vaz of the set list. “It’s a very nice way to get more people to the concert hall. And as a musician you don’t have to do anything extra for that, it’s all in the music. Take Bartók’s Music for strings, percussion and celesta. That’s part of it The Shining by Stanley Kubrick. I don’t dare watch that movie alone. It’s all music in which you somehow don’t know what to expect. And in Berlioz [het laatste deel uit zijn Symphonie fantastique, ‘Droom van een heksensabbat’] and Penderecki contain all kinds of exciting techniques, such as those glissandos in the strings.”

Trumpet Surprise

‘Horror music’ is also rehearsed in the good-sounding large hall of the Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven. Philzuid plays these, among other things, in their Halloween concert Symphonie fantastiquebut completely.

Although Philzuid rehearses a little differently: there is a lot more chatting. They see Dukas’ The sorcerer’s apprentice (which you know from Disney’s Fantasy) and also Mieczysław Weinbergs Trumpet Concerto Tuesday afternoon for the first time: pointing, striping and tickling each other’s sheet music. In the trumpet score, an unexpected loud shout appears to hit the top of a left-hand page. Awkward, because that’s just after turning the page, and then it’s already too late. Smiespel-smiespel-smiespel so. Even without musical reasons, a lot of money is shared between them. British chief conductor Duncan Ward is almost as concerned with ‘sssshhht‘-and like giving musical directions. The orchestra seems to be looking forward to it.

The witches’ Sabbath in Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie fantastique’ comes very close to the origins of Halloween.

Ward himself too, by the way. “A little more Wooh, Wóoh!”, he shouts to the violins when rehearsing The sorcerer’s apprentice. But the orchestra needs to build up better: “It gets wild too quickly, it’s not easy. Let’s get on the same page.” The second attempt goes considerably better, with a beautiful delay. The sudden banging ending – you have to know it’s coming if you don’t want to be shocked by it – goes well. Although there is a trombonist who cannot resist making a musical joke afterwards: in the silence he improvises a half closedan open ending.

Ward also believes that the Halloween theme lies in the music itself, not in the way of playing: “The sorcerer’s apprentice starts in such a magical setting, with those swirling strings. Logically, the French all worked with impressionistic harmonies at that time. Slowly that magical thing starts moving, and then it gets out of hand. The Symphonie fantastique is a kind of reconciliation with the ghostly, a long autobiographical dream in opium fumes about the woman Berlioz was in love with. Her head appears in all kinds of guises: at a ball, in the country, but also dead and ultimately on a Sabbath as a witch. The latter comes very close to the origins of Halloween: dancing Celts dressed as monsters to blend in with the demons that emerge from the underworld that evening.”

No, he doesn’t have concrete images in his head when he conducts this kind of music. But dark colors and emotions.

Surreal nightmare

Ward shines even more when he talks about Weinberg’s trumpet concerto, which is completely unknown except among trumpeters. Ward thinks it fits perfectly in a Halloween program: “It is a surreal nightmare, from a macabre, grotesque circus to soft spooky parts. You have no idea where you are or what is happening the entire time.”

Solo trumpeter Simon Höfele is not yet there on Tuesday, but he explains by telephone: “It is a bit of Frankenstein’s monster, which consists of all kinds of parts stuck together. There are so many unexpected twists that the house of cards collapses if someone does not concentrate 110 percent. The trumpet comes in at the most unexpected moments. Not, as with Haydn, nice and predictable after four or eight beats, and if he wants to be crazy after seven beats. If the contrabassoonist starts one beat too early, I will definitely start wrong eighteen bars later. That extreme focus in such an exciting piece gives a performance a very special atmosphere.”

And several of those entries are also well-known trumpet themes from other pieces. Höfele and Ward both say it: “Mahler, Mendelssohn, Bizet, Rimsky-Korsakov. It is as if old composers come haunting.”

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