Danse Macabre —Montreal Symphony/Kent Nagano (Decca 4830396)
Perfect for Halloween week, this 2016 release features perennial favorites like the title track by Camille Saint-Saëns, Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas. But there are some surprises, too! Antonin Dvorak’s symphonic poem, The Noonday Witch, deserves to enter the Halloween pantheon with these other works, but Mily Balakirev’s Tamara is not strictly a Halloween piece. It’s an example of the composer’s exploration of Orientalism and is inspired by a poem of Mikhail Lermontov about the seductress Tamara, who waylays travelers in her tower at the gorge of Daryal and allows them to savor a night of sensual delights before killing them and flinging their bodies into the River Terek! Balakirev evokes both the poem's setting of the mountains and gorges of the Caucasus and the angelic and demonically seductive power of Tamara herself. The final piece on the disc is explicitly seasonal: Charles Ives’s Halloween, a brief musical trick- and-treat!