Albany has spent decades getting overlooked for the flashier cities around it, close enough to Manhattan and the Adirondacks that most people just pass through on their way somewhere else.
Turns out that reputation has been lagging behind reality for a while now.
Resonance Consultancy’s 2026 America’s Best Cities report, the most comprehensive edition the firm has ever published, evaluated all 393 U.S. metros on livability, lovability, and prosperity.
Albany landed at No. 54 overall, and Resonance specifically flagged the Capital Region as having a “perception deficit,” meaning its measurable performance is quietly outpacing its reputation.
The city ranked a strong No. 33 nationally for livability, suggesting the quality of life here is a lot better than most people give it credit for.
This October, the capital city is giving New Yorkers a genuinely weird and wonderful reason to make the trip up the Hudson: a Halloween candlelight concert inside a building shaped like an egg, where thousands of candles and a live string quartet take on everything from “Thriller” to “Psycho.”
30 October 2026 20:30
The Egg – Swyer Theatre
It has nothing to do with the State Capitol building, and everything to do with one of the strangest concert halls in the country.
Here’s everything you need to know about the show before it sells out.
The venue is basically a UFO that took 12 years to land
The concert is landing inside The Egg, a performing arts center that looks exactly like its name suggests, a smooth concrete dome perched on a narrow stem in the middle of Albany’s Empire State Plaza.
It is, unmistakably, one of the strangest and most striking buildings in the entire state.
Construction started in 1966 and didn’t wrap until 1978, a twelve-year build that makes sense once you learn what’s actually holding the thing up. The stem that appears to prop up The Egg from the plaza floor actually plunges six stories underground, and the shape itself is held together by a massive reinforced concrete “girdle” poured directly into the shell.
The building sits inside the larger Empire State Plaza complex, a government campus with its own wild origin story. Governor Nelson Rockefeller reportedly sketched out the entire concept mid-flight with architect Wallace Harrison after feeling embarrassed by how downtown Albany looked during a visit from Dutch royalty.
The state then acquired the 98.5-acre site through eminent domain in 1962, displaced roughly 7,000 residents, and demolished over a thousand buildings to make room for it. Whatever you think of that history, the result includes The Egg’s two theaters, the Swyer and the Kitty Carlisle Hart, and a public art collection scattered throughout the plaza that most tourists never think to look for.
What actually happens at the candlelight concert
Picture the lights dropping until the only glow left in the room comes from hundreds of individual candle flames, reflected off a ceiling that curves overhead like the inside of an actual eggshell.
That’s the setting for this special edition of Candlelight, and the acoustics inside The Egg’s Swyer Theatre were specifically engineered to make a small string ensemble sound massive, so the effect lands harder here than it would in a standard concert hall.
Past editions of this particular Halloween program have built their setlists around a mix of orchestral dread and horror-movie needle drops, arranged specifically for strings rather than played as background tracks. Past programs have reworked:
- Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”
- John Carpenter’s “Halloween” theme
- Bernard Herrmann’s “Psycho” prelude
- Danny Elfman’s “Beetlejuice” theme
- Camille Saint-SaĆ«ns’ “Danse Macabre”
- Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters” theme
The whole thing clocks in around an hour, tight enough that it never drags, but long enough to feel like a real outing instead of a quick photo op.
Costumes aren’t required, though given the venue and the season, showing up in something suitably dramatic wouldn’t feel out of place!
Getting there from NYC
Albany sits roughly 150 miles north of Manhattan, close enough for a genuinely easy day trip or overnight, especially with Amtrak running directly into downtown Albany from Penn Station in a little under two and a half hours.
That means no driving through the Catskills in the dark, no fighting for a parking spot near the plaza, just a train ride that drops you within walking distance of The Egg itself.
Tickets are available now through Fever, with the concert set to take place on October 30th.
Seating is assigned first-come, first-served within each pricing zone, so booking early gets you closer to the quartet.
For anyone looking to turn it into a full Albany excursion, the Empire State Plaza Visitors Center, the New York State Museum, and the Corning Tower Observation Deck are all within walking distance of the venue, making this one of the rare Halloween outings that doubles as an actual sightseeing trip!