At our 2023/24 season-opening concert, Artistic Director Mallory Thompson admitted to the audience that she went a little bit crazy planning Treats & Tricks and included 3 Tricks or musical surprises, that were not listed in the program.

All of the Treats were listed in the program book but you had to attend the concert to experience the Tricks! While those who attended this fun & spooky program know how fun the Tricks were, we thought we’d let everyone else in on Mallory’s surprises!

The 1st Trick was Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, a work that obtained perhaps its greatest exposure through the 1940 Walt Disney animated film “Fantasia.” The Band played a snippet of this great Halloween piece in two ways so that the audience could actually see the orchestration to identify what was happening dynamically.

The second Trick was a performance of In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg that included an on-stage appearance by the Mountain King himself! This familiar piece of music has been included in numerous films including “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”, “ Corpse Bride”, and “Beetlejuice.”

The final Trick of the evening, Hector Berlioz’s March to the Scaffold tells the story of a troubled artist’s drug-fueled hallucinations that he has killed his true love and is condemned to death by execution. A spine-chilling musical story in a special spooky evening of Tricks!

Join us on February 18, 2024, to see what our Artistic Director Mallory Thompson has planned for the second concert of our 2023/24 Season!

A Lifetime of Music Sunday, February 18, 2024, at 3:00 p.m. Pick-Staiger Concert Hall Northwestern University, Evanston, IL