The Tuscarawas Philharmonic is inviting families to trade their living rooms for concert seats this Halloween, staging a costume-friendly matinee called The Great Halloween Orchestra Adventure on October 24 at the Performing Arts Center at Kent State Tuscarawas. Doors open with trick-or-treating in the lobby at 2 p.m., followed by a 3 p.m. concert built around spooky classical staples and a whodunit written for kids. Audience members of all ages are encouraged to show up in costume.
The event was first detailed by Your Ohio News, which outlined the afternoon's lineup of trick-or-treating, a matinee performance, and themed programming built for family audiences. The concert takes place inside the Performing Arts Center at Kent State Tuscarawas, located at 330 University Drive NE in New Philadelphia. The 1,100-seat venue opened in November 2010 as a $17.3 million, 50,000-square-foot project built with a 75-foot fly tower and a horseshoe-shaped balcony, according to Legat Architects, which designed the facility to expand cultural access across the 180-acre campus.
A Witches' Sabbath and a Murder Mystery on the Same Bill
Musically, the program leans hard into the season. It features Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, a piece Mussorgsky originally drafted in 1867 drawing on Russian folklore about a midsummer witches' sabbath. The version audiences know today was arranged after his death by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1886 and later popularized by Disney's 1940 film Fantasia, per YourClassical, which notes Mussorgsky's original orchestral draft was never performed publicly in his lifetime.
Also on the bill is Hector Berlioz's Dream of a Witches' Sabbath, the fifth movement of his Symphonie fantastique, completed in 1830. The Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra describes the movement as a dark, hallucinatory funeral vision filled with distorted melodies and the medieval Dies Irae chant, framed around Berlioz's own fevered nightmare of sorcerers and monsters attending his funeral.
For younger listeners, the orchestra will also perform The Composer Is Dead, a piece commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony in 2006 that pairs a score by composer Nathaniel Stookey with a narrated mystery written by Daniel Handler under his pen name Lemony Snicket. The work is based on a book by Snicket and introduces young listeners to the different sections of the orchestra through a whodunit-style story, according to the Duke University Department of Music, which notes Stookey and Handler reconnected in San Francisco to build a modern, humorous alternative to classic orchestral guides like Peter and the Wolf.
Tickets and a Family-Friendly Price Tag
Dress circle seats run $20, while all other seats are priced at $15, per the seed reporting. The venue is also offering a $50 Family Pack covering up to five total tickets for a maximum of three adults, a bundle designed to make the outing more affordable for households bringing kids, according to Kent State University. Online purchases carry a $1 per ticket convenience fee, and tickets can be bought through the Performing Arts Center or online at tuscarawasphilharmonic.org.
A 90-Year-Old Orchestra With Deep Local Roots
The Halloween concert arrives during the Tuscarawas Philharmonic's 90th anniversary season, which it kicked off on August 31, 2025, with a free outdoor community concert at Tuscora Park in New Philadelphia, serving as the launch of its 2025–2026 schedule. The orchestra's roots stretch back to May 1935, when violinist and conductor Gilbert Roehm founded the group to give graduating high school musicians a community ensemble to keep playing in, according to Kent State University. Roehm combined small ensembles from surrounding towns into a full orchestra that gave its first performance at Tuscora Park in August 1936.
Today the orchestra is led by Music Director and Conductor Dr. Jungho Kim, who was appointed in 2022 after a yearlong search while concurrently serving as Director of Orchestras and Associate Professor of Conducting at Kent State University. Kim earned his doctorate at the Eastman School of Music and has conducted symphonies internationally, according to the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UNC Greensboro.
Beyond its seasonal public concerts, the orchestra runs educational programs in local schools, including Carnegie Hall's Link Up interactive concert program for elementary students across Tuscarawas County districts such as Dover and Claymont. Local elementary students study the Link Up curriculum in class before attending live interactive concerts at the Performing Arts Center, per a Dover City Schools Facebook post. Since opening in 2010, the Performing Arts Center at Kent State Tuscarawas has hosted more than 400,000 guests for touring Broadway productions, orchestral concerts, and civic events, making the Halloween matinee the latest entry in a long list of community gatherings at the New Philadelphia venue.
