CLASSICAL MUSIC

NSO Family Concert

Tot-size witches, fighter pilots and princesses flocked to the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Sunday afternoon to usher in Halloween a few days early with the National Symphony Orchestra, which treated their ears and eyes to a festive performance of spooky classical music.

As Cleopatra played Bach's Toccata in D Minor for Organ, BWV 565, conductor Emil de Cou, dressed as a pirate, paraded up the aisles with an entourage of masquerading musicians who took their places onstage beside their costumed cohorts.

It was hard not to be distracted by all the eye candy as the NSO performed several selections from "The Wizard of Oz." Closed-circuit video cameras zoomed in on individual instrumentalists to give the little ones a closer look. But by doing so, they fueled enough background chatter to compete with the orchestra's jaunty renditions of Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" and Saint-Saens's "Danse Macabre." The young listeners started settling down while the orchestra spun out "Infernal Dance" from Stravinsky's "The Firebird" with intensity and vibrant colors.

The concert's spookiest piece arrived in an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's "Francesca da Rimini," Op. 32. Accompanying a scene from the 1925 silent film "The Phantom of the Opera," the music unfolded ardently and captivated the audience as Christine unmasked the phantom.

The NSO closed out its annual concert with Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and the sweeping majesty of John Williams's "Flying Theme" from "E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial."

-- Grace Jean

Contemporary Music Forum

Classical music fans who scorn contemporary works often forget that the masterpieces they cherish may well have confused, shocked or even delighted their first audiences centuries ago. The Contemporary Music Forum puts modern classical music in front of the public with more dedication and skill than any other group in Washington, and on Sunday presented the Verge Ensemble playing six works of diverse means and ends for us to consider.

Though all six had interesting facets, four stood out as especially satisfying. Washington native Jeffrey Mumford found a natural match for his suggestive melodic fragments in poems by Sonia Sanchez, who read the texts Mumford used in "two haiku settings: of place and love" before Sunday's performance. The instrumentation of marimba, vibraphone and cello created lean, gleaming, novel sounds, while soprano Kathryn Hearden gave lovely voice to her separated, evocative monosyllables and knitted them into an affecting whole.

David Jones, playing bass clarinet, brought great style and technique to Ronald Bruce Smith's "Something Suspicious," a work inspired by those warnings from transit systems to be wary of everything around you. Low blurts (sometimes refracted electronically by Steve Antosca's computer) anchored and disrupted carefree melodic flights, and frequent breakdowns into uncertain trills increased the unease.

Douglas Geers's "Enkidu" drew a kaleidoscopic array of colors from violinist Lina Bahn, also with occasional electronic assistance from Antosca, as she threw herself into narrating the character's tale from the epic of Gilgamesh. And Erik Santos's "Sundogs" ran at a breakneck pace, further fueled by some rock drumming, in an emphatic performance by percussionists Barry Dove and William Richards.

-- Andrew Lindemann Malone