Bay Area friends: I’m joining Kronos Quartet for an evening of ~spooky~ music this Halloween night (that’s Friday, October 31 for all you heathens). Unfor­get­table poster, above, by Kronos cellist Paul Wiancko. We’ll be playing a suite from Philip Glass’s score to Dracula, by now a Halloween classic. Here is a short note about what to expect in my opening solo set:

The three composers repre­sented on my Halloween program share a fasci­na­tion with the dark. I’ve inter­wo­ven three noctur­nal move­ments from Leoš Janáček’s On An Over­grown Path (Our Evenings, Good Night!, and The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!) with new fantasy-tran­scrip­tions of pieces by Thelo­nious Monk (Crepus­cule With Nellie, Miste­rioso, and Round Midnight). I love how these pieces by two very differ­ent composers seem to speak to each other across conti­nents and cultures, their inven­tive and idio­syn­cratic languages finding parallel tonal regis­ters and rhetor­i­cal flour­ishes. To cap off the program, we’ll hear the premiere of a new work: a recent birthday gift from my friend Gabriel Kahane, written expressly for the occasion. A Gorey Nocturne (inspired by the late author and illus­tra­tor) is an eerie and eventful gymnopédie which follows the entirely fictional char­ac­ter “Timothy Anders” on an unex­pect­edly paranormal—yet ulti­mately successful—grocery shopping expedition.