'Candlelight Concerts' series to bring Halloween, fall event to Tucson

The global entertainment platform behind Oro Valley’s Van Gogh Experience is bringing its classical music “Candlelight Concerts” series to Tucson this fall.

The series will present four concerts at Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 2331 E. Adams St., with a quartet of Tucson musicians performing on a stage lit up with candles.

The series, created by the Madrid, Spain-based Fever and launched in 2014, has reached more than 100 cities since coming to the U.S. in 2019, said Candlelight’s West Coast project manager Rosa Nguyen.

“It’s just been this ball that’s continued to roll and now we’re bringing it to Tucson,” she said.

Candlelight Concerts, an original production of Fever’s growing catalogue of entertainment collaborations worldwide, uses the New York-based musician recruiting company Listeso Music Group to hire local musicians for the concerts. Listeso, launched in 2016 with the goal of helping local freelance musicians land paid gigs in their communities, recruits professional and student musicians for the concerts.

“It is incredibly important for us that they are local,” Nguyen said. “Our event staff, our musicians — we try to stay as local as possible.”

The goal of the series is to make classical music accessible to all audiences through the setting and the programming. Musicians perform everything from Bach to Beyoncé illuminated by hundreds of flickering candles.

The Tucson series of four concerts opens in October with a Halloween-themed program that includes Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and theme songs from “Stranger Things,” “The Addams Family,” “Halloween,” “Psycho” and “Ghostbusters,” mixed with classical music including Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 in C minor and Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig.”

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In November, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” anchors a classical concert that includes works by Jules Massenet and Astor Piazzolla, as well as the German-born British composer Max Richter’s “Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi — The Four Seasons,” in which he reconstructs “Four Seasons” using just a quarter of Vivaldi’s original score.

On Nov. 3, a special concert celebrates film score composer Hans Zimmer (“The Lion King,” “Thelma & Louise”) followed on Nov. 4 with the music of Taylor Swift.

Tucson is the second Arizona city to get the series. It came to Phoenix in 2021 and Nguyen said concerts held at the Phoenix Zoo are among Candlelight Concerts’ most popular events.

“That is just an incredible experience with the animals and open air and candlelight,” she said.

Nguyen said Fever is testing the waters in the Tucson market, which has a robust culture arts scene that includes the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, Arizona Opera, True Concord Voices & Orchestra, Southern Arizona Symphony, Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music that present concerts throughout the fall and spring.

“So far reception has been great and we’ve added more dates,” Nguyen said. “Phoenix has done wonderfully and we want to see Tucson grow at the same pace. Our goal with where we expand, we take into account not only the culture of the city itself, we want to make it accessible to everyone.”

For concert dates, tickets and program details, visit feverup.com/en/tucson/candlelight.