Symphony players dress up for ‘Spooktacular’ program

It’s nearly three weeks to Halloween, but the Arkansas Symphony, most of which was creatively costumed, went bump in the night Saturday at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall.

They got a jump on the holiday with a pops program of spooky, semi-spooky and quasi-spooky movie music titled Halloween Spooktacular, the first of the season’s Acxiom Pops Live! concerts.

Conductor Philip Mann got fully into the spirit of things, donning full Ghostbuster gear for the first half, which he kicked off, of course, with music from Ghostbusters. He drew cheers from the crowd (many of whom also came costumed) for his post-intermission getup, reflecting the second-act curtain raiser, Michael Jackson’s Thriller (during which audience members did a front-of-the-stage costume parade).

Four of the program’s symphonic movie tunes came from film composer extraordinaire John Williams — the Superman theme “March,” the main title and “first victim” music from Jaws, two portions of the suite from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and the closer, the main title music from Star Wars.

Two were by Danny Elfman — his main title music for Edward Scissorhands and theme music from Spider

Top notes for the evening came from the two truly classical pieces that the orchestra gave top-notch performances — Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain (which Walt Disney used in Fantasia) and the “Ride of the Valkyries” from Richard Wagner’s second “Ring Cycle” opera, Die Walkure, which has had innumerable screen uses, including the accompaniment for Army helicopters attack- ing in Apocalpyse Now and the source music for Elmer Fudd killing the wabbit in the Bugs Bunny cartoon “What’s Opera, Doc.”

There were, as usual, plenty of extramusical gimmicks, and, as usual, some of them worked (the comedy sketch involving the inflatable shark, for example) and some didn’t (a first-half appearance by the Grim Reaper was only worthwhile as a setup for a second-half joke.)

Best orchestra-member costumes include the oboe section, clad in common as “jailbirds,” a violin-section Valkyrie and three Waldos (one, trombonist Justin Isenhour, also was the theremin soloist in the X-Files theme).

Mann and the musicians will go bump in the afternoon at 3 p.m. today at Robinson, West Markham Street and Broadway.

Ticket information is available by calling (501) 666-1761 or online at ArkansasSymphony.org.