program
La Valse
Film: The Sealed Room (1907)
"Billie Jean"
"Paranoid Android"
Film: The Red Spectre (1907)
Danse macabre
Film: Excerpts from The Haunted House (1921)
Selections from The Rite of Spring
Film: Excerpts from The Rite of Spring: A Musical Odyssey (2013)
Young Frankenstein
Ragtime alla turca
performances
If you would like assistance purchasing tickets for patrons with disabilities, please call the box office at 415-864-6000.
Event Description
Come to Davies Symphony Hall for a spooky evening of musical chills and comical thrills this Halloween! Watch Mel Brooks’ hilarious cult classic Young Frankenstein on the big screen*, paired with chart-topping piano duo Anderson & Roe performing haunting music and silent film accompaniment with spine-tingling twenty-fingered dexterity—so good it’s scary.
*Feature film without live accompaniment. The San Francisco Symphony does not appear in this performance.
At a Glance
Drama, Created on the Spot
Even before sound came to motion pictures, music was part of the movie-going experience. It was a pragmatic matter in the early days. Projectors were loud machines, and the noise they made could distract from what was unfolding onscreen, so a piano became a theater mainstay. Music drowned out the racket. The gifted musicians that played these instruments (usually piano or organ) were dramatists who used their improvisational skills to help interpret celluloid tales and draw an audience into a film’s embrace. In their own way, they were forerunners of the composers whose scores began to be heard on film soundtracks not long after soundtracks became a staple part of films and the silent era receded into the past. Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe give silent film accompaniment a new spin, performing their arrangements of favorite classical and pop/rock works in the service of three masterpieces of horror. Happy Halloween!
