Celebrate spooky season with three of our favorite spine-tingling piano works
Less than two weeks remain until countless ghosts, ghouls, and goblins take to the streets in search of chocolatey treats. So as you spend the dark evenings ahead carving pumpkins and festooning your front doors with cobweb mazes, here are three piano works to get you in a musical mood for Halloween.
Alexander Gavrylyuk
J. S. Bach / Ferruccio Busoni: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
Could Bach have ever envisioned the sense of fear and dread the opening notes of his Toccata and Fugue in D Minor would elicit in today's music lovers? Although this classic is often heard in its original version for organ — or Leopold Stokowski's orchestral arrangement made famous in Disney's Fantasia — we're sharing a performance of Busoni's devilishly virtuosic version for solo piano. From the eerie silences to the dissonant harmonies, this is music that's certain to elicit goosebumps.
Khatia Buniatishvili
Modest Mussorgsky: The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba Yaga)
In Slavic folklore, two words strike fear into the heart of every child: Baba Yaga. Not only is the supernatural witch known for kidnapping and cooking children, but she also lives in a menacing forest hut that perpetually spins atop a pair of chicken legs. In his kaleidoscopic Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky immortalized in music this dark fairy tale, where crashing chords and fiendish flights up and down the keyboard bring to life Baba Yaga's eternal hunt for her next victim.
Sholto Kynoch (piano) and Daniel Norman (tenor)
Franz Schubert: Erlkönig
We usually turn to Schubert for breathtaking melodies that put hearts and minds at rest. But in perhaps his most famous art song, Erlkönig, our blood pressure races through every thundering bar.
Setting a poem by Goethe, Schubert paints a vivid portrait of a child and his father as they're chased by the Erl King on a dark and stormy night. Against a relentless backdrop of stamping horse hooves in the piano, Schubert unleashes his epic monodrama where the voice breathes life into four characters: a narrator, the frightened child, his consoling father, and the goblin king who ultimately claims the young boy's life.