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Kent Nagano's 2016 collection of supernatural-themed tone poems brings together three orchestral classics and three less frequently programmed pieces. Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Modest Mussorgsky's A Night on the Bare Mountain are famous from their use in Walt Disney's Fantasia, and Camille Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre has become standard fare for Hallowe'en concerts. However, Antonín Dvorák's The Noonday Witch, Mily Balakirev's Tamara, and Charles Ives' Hallowe'en are likely unfamiliar to most listeners. The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal delivers vivid live renditions that capture the spookiness and fun of these eerie compositions, and are at their best in the swirling demonic passages of A Night on the Bare Mountain and Danse Macabre. The stories of Tamara, an evil queen who lures men to their doom, and the Noonday Witch, who is summoned to punish a misbehaving child, are easy to follow with the descriptions in the booklet, and Ives' more general depiction of children dancing around a bonfire is a lively encore that closes the album with a bang.© TiVo

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Dr. John's Gris-Gris is among the most enduring recordings of the psychedelic era; it sounds as mysterious and spooky in the 21st century as it did in 1968. It is the album where Mac Rebennack established a stage identity that has served him well. A respected studio ace in his native New Orleans, Rebennack was scuffling in L.A. Gris-Gris was his concept, an album that wove various threads of New Orleans music together behind the character of "Dr. John," a real voodoo root doctor from the 19th century. Harold Batiste, another ex-pat New Orleanian and respected arranger in Hollywood, scored him some free studio time left over from a Sonny & Cher session. They assembled a crack band of NOLA exiles and session players including saxophonist Plas Johnson, singers Jessie Hill and Shirley Goodman, and guitarist/mandolinist Richard "Didimus" Washington. Almost everyone played percussion. Gris-Gris sounds like a post-midnight ceremony recorded in the bayou swamp instead of L.A.'s Gold Star Studio where Phil Spector cut hits. The atmosphere is thick, smoky, serpentine, foreboding. Rebennack inhabits his character fully, delivering Creole French and slang English effortlessly in the grain of his half-spoken, half-sung voice. He is high priest and trickster, capable of blessing, cursing, and conning. On the opening incantation "Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya," Dr. John introduces himself as the "night tripper" and boasts of his medicinal abilities accompanied by wafting reverbed mandolins, hand drums, a bubbling bassline, blues harmonica, skeletal electric guitar, and a swaying backing chorus that blurs the line between gospel and soul. On "Danse Kalinda Boom," a calliope-sounding organ, Middle Eastern flute, Spanish-tinged guitars, bells, claves, congas, and drums fuel a wordless chorus in four-part chant harmony as a drum orgy evokes ceremonial rites. The sound of NOLA R&B comes to the fore in the killer soul groove of the breezy "Mama Roux." "Croker Courtboullion" is an exercise in vanguard jazz. Spectral voices, electric guitars, animal cries, flute, and moody saxophone solos and percussion drift in and out of the spacy mix. The set's masterpiece is saved for last, the nearly nearly eight-minute trance vamp in "I Walk on Gilded Splinters" (covered by everyone from Humble Pie, Cher, and Johnny Jenkins to Paul Weller and Papa Mali). Dr. John is brazen about the power of his spells in a slippery, evil-sounding boast. Congas, tom-toms, snaky guitar, and harmonica underscore his juju, while a backing chorus affirms his power like mambo priestesses in unison. A ghostly baritone saxophone wafts through the turnarounds. Droning blues, steamy funk, and loopy R&B are inseparably entwined in its groove. Remarkably, though rightfully considered a psychedelic masterpiece, there is little rock music on Gris-Gris. Its real achievement -- besides being a classic collection of startlingly deep tunes -- is that it brought New Orleans' cultural iconographies and musical traits to the attention of an emergent rock audience.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

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As dance floor fodder goes, Cheese is definitely above average, adding a doze of elegance to the prerequisite "shake-yer-booty" simplistic sound. The music is built around staccato beats that are appropriately primitive, but not mindless, and keyboard lines that are just as sparse, but never lose the otherworldly quality expected of good techno, and come off more earnest than they were probably meant to be. Paul van Haver's vocals may seem to be contrasting the music -- his drawn-out, quiet and clearly enunciated half-whispers in places come close to a somewhat pompous sermon, but mostly sound like a dispassionate news report on some pretty hot things, though you won't know it from the anchor's tone. He is also pretty wordy, which gives the record a French rap vibe at times (though there is no actual rapping), but overall, his vocals help to ground in reality what otherwise would have been pretty abstract music. The whole affair is really quite plain songwriting-wise and doesn't sport any big hooks, but creates an authentic nighttime vibe, and while the music fades into background after a while, it remains fun every time you pay attention -- or catch yourself toe-tapping. The record's main hit, "Alors on danse," may even stir expectations of the album being something above a plain old dance record, but it does not really live up to those -- not because the rest of the music is not up to par, but because it sounds exactly like that one song, which, repeated eleven times over, tends to impress less than it does at three minutes. So, plain old dance record it is, but nobody said it's a bad thing.© Alexey Eremenko /TiVo

With Les Indes galantes by Jean-Philippe Rameau, György Vashegyi – along with his Orfeo Orchestra and Purcell Choir – makes a further dazzling addition to their Glossa series of French dramatic masterpieces from the Baroque, and in the company of a luxurious line-up of vocal soloists. The version of this “ballet heroïque” – supplied with an anti-colonial, anti-clerical manifesto by librettist Louis Fuzelier – selected by Vashegyi is the 1761 revision, a mere decade or so before the irruption onto the Parisian musical scene of the likes of Gluck and Grétry. Rameau’s score had undergone frequent adjustments and improvements since its première a quarter of a century earlier, and the performing edition for this recording, prepared for the Rameau Opera Omnia by Sylvie Bouissou (who also provides a booklet essay here), offers a vision of this work which is more theatrical, fluid and concise than hitherto. Just in themselves, the names of Chantal Santon-Jeffery, Katherine Watson, Véronique Gens, Reinoud Van Mechelen, Jean-Sébastien Bou and Thomas Dolié (sharing out the dozen solo roles) augur well for a glorious exploration of the prologue and three entrées ahead. Recently, they have also, in conjunction with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, been working on questions of tempo and how to perform Rameau’s sequences as the composer intended. Vashegyi brings a consummate understanding of Rameau’s galante style to the proceedings, following two previous Ramellian Glossa outings (Naïs and Les Fêtes de Polymnie). © Glossa