The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra plays Halloween weekend at home with 'Hocus Pocus' live

The ASO plays John Debney's score live to the film at Atlanta Symphony Hall this Friday and Sunday, in the middle of a season built around Nathalie Stutzmann's Brahms cycle.

Some people in the Symphony Hall seats on Friday night will be in costume, and nobody at the Woodruff Arts Center will mind. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra plays *Disney's Hocus Pocus in Concert* at Atlanta Symphony Hall on Friday, October 30 at 7:30pm. A second performance follows on Sunday, November 1 at 3:00pm. The film runs on the big screen while the orchestra plays John Debney's score live underneath it.

Stuart Chafetz conducts. The ASO describes Debney as an Emmy-winning, GRAMMY-nominated composer, and his music for the 1993 Halloween comedy is the reason a film-with-orchestra night works. Hear it live and the cauldron cues and the chase music land with weight that a living-room speaker can't give them. Tickets are on sale through the ASO.

Calling this a homecoming is a little funny, because the ASO never really leaves. Our records have the orchestra playing Atlanta 156 times, more than any other market, and nearly all of those dates are in this one 1,762-seat room on Peachtree Street. That's why a weekend like this matters. A movie night is often how a family's first trip to Symphony Hall happens, and the ASO has built a whole Movies in Concert series around that fact. Plenty of Atlanta concertgoers who now subscribe first walked in for a film score.

The orchestra that plays Hocus Pocus on Friday is the same one working through Brahms the rest of the season.

The serious work goes on around it. Music director Nathalie Stutzmann has built her 2026–27 subscription season around Johannes Brahms. Her Brahms series covers all four symphonies, four concertos, the *Academic Festival Overture* and *Ein deutsches Requiem*, which arrives in April. Before that, the ASO's calendar has a Fauré Requiem and Bruckner's Fifth, both in November. The orchestra has also been back in the studio under Stutzmann. Her first symphonic album for Warner Classics/Erato, Dvořák's Ninth Symphony and *American Suite* with the ASO, came out in August 2024.

The two sides of the season fit together better than they might seem to. Film scoring grew out of the late-Romantic orchestra, the same horns, low strings and big tuttis Brahms wrote for. A kid who leaves Friday's show humming the witches' theme has been listening to the same kind of orchestra that plays Brahms for subscribers the rest of the year.

If Halloween is your holiday, Friday night is the obvious pick: it's the night before, the crowd will be loud, and you'll be out by a reasonable hour. Sunday's 3pm matinee suits younger kids. Either way, the ASO's events page has the rest of the fall if one night in the hall leaves you wanting another, which happens more often than you'd think.

Sources: Disney's Hocus Pocus in Concert — Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (aso.org); Movies in Concert — Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (aso.org); Events — Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (aso.org); Nathalie Stutzmann — Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (aso.org); Atlanta Symphony Orchestra — artist page (aso.org); File:Atlanta Symphony Hall, inside.jpg — Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org); Brahms Revealed - Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (aso.org)