I tend to be a Grinch about seasonal programming, but I’m always open to being proven wrong.
Halloween offers plenty to work with beyond scares: costumes, impersonation, tricks, treats, chance encounters in the dark and the macabre. More than a holiday, it’s an invitation to step into another character and imagine another reality.
Chamber Music St. Louis billed Monday night’s concert as “A Chamber Nightmare,” but horror wasn’t the dominant spirit in the room.
The program opened with J.S. Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in D Minor, a piece that has become shorthand for cinematic dread through decades of film and television use. In pianist Shen Wen’s solo performance, however, those associations quickly fell away. Stripped of its popular-culture baggage, the work revealed itself as something richer and more nuanced. Bach’s lyrical passages danced alongside the darker moments, and Wen navigated them with remarkable ease and clarity.
If there was anything spooky about the performance, it was how clearly a solo pianist can expose the framework of a composition. This was Bach down to the bones.
Wen followed with a stunning performance of Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1, a work that underscored how much Halloween is about transformation rather than terror. Liszt borrowed from the Faust legend, but this felt less like a descent into darkness than an act of imaginative role-playing. Wen turned the piano into an instrument of illusion, conjuring entire worlds through touch, color and momentum.
The evening shifted gears when violinists Kyle Lombard and Ann Fink, violist Susan Gordon and cellist Bjorn Ranheim took the stage for three ragtime-inspired works by William Bolcom.
Ragtime has always carried a mischievous streak, and Bolcom leaned into it. In Poltergeist, the quartet handled the composer’s abrupt stops and starts with pinpoint precision. Every pause landed exactly where it needed to.
The second piece, Graceful Ghost, revealed Bolcom’s more lyrical side. By the time the ensemble reached Incineratorag, the music had largely traded shadows for light. The quartet’s agile playing brought warmth and personality to every phrase, and at moments the melodies seemed almost to sing actual words.
The night’s Halloween mask slipped even further during Wen’s performance of Edvard Grieg’s March of the Trolls from Lyric Pieces. Despite its title, the music felt more playful than menacing, less an invasion than a ramble through unfamiliar woods.
Later, Chamber Music St. Louis Executive Director Marc Gordon introduced Aase’s Death from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 as the program’s most somber selection. Performed by the quartet, it carried genuine sadness and reflection, but little of the fear often associated with death.
The concert closed with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano in D Major, performed by Fink, Ranheim and Wen. Its famous slow movement inspired the nickname “Ghost Trio” because early listeners associated it with the supernatural atmosphere of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Whatever ghosts listeners may have found there, I found something else.
I heard nobility, emotional depth and the elemental beauty that emerges when piano, violin and cello lock into conversation. Like the best Halloween haul, the reward wasn’t the packaging. It was what was inside.
And if Beethoven was the evening’s designated ghost, he’s welcome to haunt me anytime.