Happy Halloween from Anesthesioboeland

Ok, I'll admit it: this Halloween thing's not so bad...

I tried to get into the spirit of things (so to speak) by making myself a Halloween classical music mix (lots of oboe parts!):

1. from Giselle, Act II: the opening, subsequent allegro, and "allegro feroce," when the wilis dance poor Hilarion to death
2. Carabosse's appearance from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty
3. Selections from Swan Lake: the overture, Odile's entrance and exit, and the storm scene
4. "O Fortuna" from Orff's Carmina Burana
5. Catacombs from Musorgsky's* Pictures at an Exhibition
6. Musorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain

(I almost included the funerary procession from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet but I find it too scary and disturbing.)

What really put some cheer into my Halloween blues, in addition to that pumpkin carving game Anali told me about a couple of days ago, and a productive oboe lesson with Kyoko today, was the pumpkin contest at one of our hospitals. I thought the entry from Labor & Delivery was particularly cute, and that the "Witchie-Poo" created by one of our very own O.R. nurses was spectacular. I'll sign off and leave a pumpkin gallery here for fun, along with a couple of shots of our candy-serving mummy, Queepy, who makes an appearance at our door once a year. See below, too, for a suggested Halloween reading list. Happy haunting!










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Suggested reading for the ghostly season:

Skellig by David Almond
The Devil's Storybook by Natalie Babbitt
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Haunted Mountain by Mollie Hunter
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
House of Stairs by William Sleator
Jeremy Visick by David Wiseman

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*A program note from Kyoko's last concert teaches that the correct transliteration of Musorgsky from Russian contains only 1 s; the double s spelling came to us via the French, but now scholarly writings in English are using the single s, though commercially, apparently, the double s is still in play (no pun intended) because it's what people are used to.