Giuseppe Tartini — Devil’s Trill Sonata

In 1713, Tartini dreamed he handed the Devil his violin — and the Devil played something so impossibly beautiful that upon waking, Tartini wrote this sonata in a desperate attempt to recapture it. He considered it a pale shadow of what he had heard, yet it remains one of the most demanding and haunting works in the violin repertoire. The climactic fourth movement features the infamous “devil’s trill” — sustained double-stop trills played simultaneously with a singing melody — a technically terrifying feat that feels genuinely supernatural.

Niccolò Paganini — Caprice No. 13, “Devil’s Laughter”

Paganini himself was rumoured to have sold his soul for his terrifying virtuosity — and Caprice No. 13 does nothing to discourage that legend. Nicknamed Il riso del diavolo (The Devil’s Laughter), it opens with eerily smooth double stops before exploding into a flurry of rapid runs and string crossings that seem to mock human limitation. Brief and diabolically efficient, it is a portrait of infernal wit — laughter that cuts.

Pablo de Sarasate — Faust Fantasy, Op. 13

Spanish virtuoso Sarasate was a master of the operatic concert fantasy — the 19th century’s way of bringing beloved arias to the recital stage. His Faust Fantasy plunges into Gounod’s tale of soul-selling: the pact with Méphistophélès, the seduction of Marguerite, and the glittering waltz of damnation. Sarasate opens with suitably diabolical harmonies before weaving the opera’s most irresistible melodies into a showpiece of lyrical brilliance and bravura fireworks.

Eugène Ysaÿe — Sonata No. 2, “Obsession”

Written in a single inspired night in 1923, Ysaÿe’s six solo sonatas are among the most demanding works ever composed for unaccompanied violin. The second, dedicated to French violinist Jacques Thibaud, earns its subtitle from Thibaud’s obsessive daily practice of Bach’s E-major Partita — which Ysaÿe quotes and then violently disrupts with the Dies irae, the medieval plainchant of death. These two forces — Bach’s luminous counterpoint and the grim chant — battle throughout all four movements, creating a haunted, otherworldly drama.

Igor Stravinsky — Three Movements from Petrushka (for piano solo), III. Shrovetide Fair

Stravinsky’s 1911 ballet Petrushka is set at a Russian Shrovetide carnival where a puppet comes to life, falls in love, and is killed. The third movement depicts the raucous, spinning energy of the fairground — barrel organs, dancing bears, and surging crowds — all translated into a dazzling, percussive piano transcription Stravinsky made in 1921. Few pieces reveal the piano’s power to suggest an entire orchestra. The writing is ferociously difficult, and deliberately so: the fair never stops for breath.

Camille Saint-Saëns — Danse Macabre, Op. 40

At midnight on Halloween, Death tunes his fiddle — and one of his strings is deliberately mistuned, producing the dissonant tritone known to medieval musicians as diabolus in musica (the devil in music). So opens Saint-Saëns’s 1874 tone poem, in which skeletons clamber from their graves and dance till dawn. The solo violin plays Death himself, the Dies irae chant appears in eerie disguise midway through, and the xylophone rattles like bones. When the rooster crows, the skeletons return to their graves — until next year.

John Williams — Devil’s Dance, from The Witches of Eastwick

Williams’s Oscar-nominated score for the 1987 film — in which Jack Nicholson plays a charming, all-powerful Devil — is one of his most gleefully devilish creations. The Devil’s Dance, featured over the end credits, is Williams’s own contribution to the great tradition of diabolical music: a tarantella-like showpiece in triple time, twisting harmonically and melodically like a malicious spirit. With fiddle-like open strings evoking the devil’s own instrument, it closes tonight’s programme with wit, fire, and a knowing wink from the dark side.