Halloween music that I'm taking back

If you don't know it by now, I'm a big lover of classical music. And on this Halloween, I can't help but think about several pieces of music that have become so interconnected with Halloween that I fear their original essence has become lost. But like Randal in Clerks 2, I'm taking them back!

I personally like to distance myself from the televised, commercialized, bastardized versions of these pieces and listen to them as they were meant to be heard: full-length performances filled with glory and majesty, and not the chopped-up, badly-edited renditions we so often hear. The full-length performances have so much more to offer, I feel.

Seriously, try listening to these pieces in their entirety! I know they may feel commonplace with Halloween, but you might just discover something new in the process.

"Dance Macabre" by Camille Saint-Saens

"Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky

In the Hall of the Mountain King (from the Peer Gynt Suite) by Edward Grieg

Tell me this one doesn't sound a tiny bit familiar!

"Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor" (3rd movement) by Frederic Chopin

And last but not least . . . !

"Toccata and Fugue in D minor" by Johann Sebastian Bach

One day I want to hear this performed on a live organ. I can't even begin to imagine the enormity and profundity of the experience.