Candlelight: Halloween Classics

Candlelight: Halloween Classics gathers the music of fear and hands it to a string quartet playing by candlelight. The programme runs across two traditions at once: concert works that unsettled listeners long before cinema existed, and the screen themes that have since become shorthand for dread.

From the concert side come pieces built to sound sinister. Saint-Saens set a skeleton fiddling in a graveyard, Mussorgsky staged a witches' sabbath, Gounod wrote a funeral march for a marionette, and Shostakovich supplies the sardonic edge underneath. Against them sit the film and television themes: Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings, Danny Elfman's crooked waltzes, and the electronic motifs of more recent horror, all rewritten so four bowed instruments carry what synthesizers and full orchestras usually do.

The candlelit setting does much of the work. Horror music depends on suggestion, and a quartet playing unamplified in flickering light supplies exactly the wrong kind of intimacy: close enough that a tremolo or a glissando registers as physical rather than atmospheric. It is a novelty programme played entirely straight, which is why it lands.