It's Halloween weekend, but there's no need to schlep over to some makeshift haunted house or navigate a cornfield maze to get in the mood. The Pittsburgh Symphony has you covered. Chainsaw sound effects are nice, but where else can you get the 100 musicians recreating a witches' sabbath or a guillotine sending a man's head rolling (including it thumping onto the floor)?

Yes, Heinz Hall was the place for one of classical music's most ghoulish music in Hector Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique" conducted by Marek Janowski. Camille Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre" would have been more fitting, but I have always imagined spirits and skeletons dancing in the finale of his Piano Concerto No. 2 which the guest pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet played. Plus, Thibaudet was scary good.

The last time the French pianist with a penchant for haute couture was in Heinz Hall was 2002, and last night his own fantastique performance made that seem too long a period. Beginning with the opening solo flourish and continuing through the cascading runs of the first movement, Thibaudet played like a man possessed. His hands covered the keyboard -- and often jumped over each other -- with such quickness and assurance that he always had ample time to consider tone. His timbre was largely that crystal clear, bell-like tone of the French school, but with the second theme he offered a gorgeous velvet tone.

In the middle movement, Thibaudet skated across the surface of the music (and the keyboard), and in the finale he created a frantic mood with manic trills and well-timed accents. Far too often Saint-Saens is played with heightened seriousness to compensate for the composer's reputation as a lightweight. But Thibaudet's approach countered by taking the piece at its face value and letting us decide if it is worthy. By playing the bravura piece with flashiness, it actually gave it more substance. He offered Chopin's famous Nocturne in E-Flat Major as an encore.

If I didn't mention the PSO or Janowski, it's only because I was spellbound by Thibaudet. But after intermission, it was the orchestra's time to cast its own magic. And a good thing, too, as the weekend's performances are being recorded for a new CD on Pentatone.

I will admit I was unsure if this was the right repertoire for Janowski to record. After all, only two years ago Heinz Hall heard a magnificent interpretation of "Symphonie fantastique" by Yan Pascal Tortelier, a Frenchman steeped in the tradition. But I am more than happy to be wrong, and the PSO's effort under Janowski was something to behold.

The orchestra buzzed with near-palpable electricity and played the long Berlioz lines with the lithe quality they deserve, including the second theme the composer called the idee fixe. That melody represents the woman that the protagonist musician in this symphonic story is desperate to win, and it is one of the most disjunct tunes in classical music. To render it lyrical is no easy thing, but the violins and then other sections (including a sonorous fragment by clarinetist Michael Rusinek in the second movement) did so with grace.

Truth be told, the last two movements, "The March to the Scaffold" and "Dream of the Witches' Sabbath," while spectacular, are interpretively simple for a conductor. But the third movement, "For the Country," is where a great reading is made. Janowski built the dynamics of the adagio so well, from the duet of English horn player Harold Smoliar and off-stage oboist James Gorton to the four timpani players at the end signifying distant thunder. The ambiance of loneliness he cultivated lingered before the raucous end with its funeral chant, boisterous brass, mocking clarinets and clashing cymbals.

The program repeats at 8 tonight and 2:30 tomorrow.

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