The University Organist Recital Series took a trip down a dark road on the eve of Halloween with Emory University organist Timothy Albrecht’s Scary Ride!

Walking into the Emerson Concert Hall, audience members discovered that it had been transformed into a spooky underworld. The hall lights were dimmed to create an eerie atmosphere and the visual effects of lightning were projected on the stage’s background walls. The sound of thunder roared through the speakers.
A coffin was perched in the choral balcony across seats that were covered in string that lit up in the dark looking like spider webs.

It was certain that the audience was caught in the dark underworld when Albrecht took the stage in a cape, with his white face and long, gleaming fangs glowing in the darkness. Count Dracula had made his entrance.

The night’s performance was a musical attraction of spooky Halloween music played on the university’s own Jaeckel Opus 45 Emerson Concert Hall Organ, a focal point in the Schwartz Center.

The first piece Albrecht played was a fusion of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” and Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” and was the longest of all the pieces. While the musical theme from “Phantom” was apparent, elements of Bach’s toccata were well incorporated into it to create a unique blend.

What made this piece stand out were the sporadic screams and laughs that were heard by characters that were sitting very still in the corners and seats of the choral balcony. Among these mysterious creatures were a witch, a villain and two monsters. In the middle of the performance, they suddenly stood up and moved in place. Because they moved in circular motions, they seemed to look like machines, but they were actually humans.

Because Albrecht was so far away from the audience, a large screen stretched out over the organ inside the choral loft. Audience members laughed as they watched the screen, which often showed Albrecht garnishing his performance with comedic antics, including biting into food and throwing it over his shoulder as he played.

At one point he pretended to fall asleep while playing and a picture of a blinking eye was projected on the background walls.

The next piece offered yet another combination, this time of Louis Vierne’s “Maestro in C-Sharp Minor” and Franz Liszt’s “Fantasy.”

“The Old Castle” from Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky showed an even slighter variation in the assortment of music played. While most of the other pieces started off fast with swift note changes, “The Old Castle” began slowly and grew in the darkness of its timbre to invoke the same mysterious feel of the other pieces.

“Toccata” by Henri Mulet, the last composition played, summarized the spooky feeling of the night in being the most spirited.

It was the fastest arrangement of the program and it also made the characters move around again. They chased each other and got into little fights.

College freshman Saihari Dukkipati, said he was satisfied with the music, but
did not feel the same way about other attractions. “I thought it could have been scarier,” he said, laughing.

But the spectacle attracted more than just students. In fact, those in attendance represented a much wider range of locals, from senior citizens to very small children.

And with Dracula and his monsters there to accompany a few Halloween-appropriate tunes, the performance definitely added just the right amount of spook to start Halloween off right.

— Contact Malcolm Tariq.