DownWithTyranny!: [1/23/2011] We begin our walk-through of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" (continued)

The start of Vladimir Horowitz' famous (and famously extravagant) rendering of Pictures

JUST A FEW MORE THINGS BEFORE WE START
WALKING. LIKE, WHO WAS VIKTOR HARTMANN?

Given his history with the pictures, I think it's worth hearing Alfred Frankenstein out on the subject of them, their creator, and the composer who brings us here today.

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was a composer of genius totally devoted to the Russian nationalist ideal. Viktor Alexandrovich Hartmann [left] was an architect and designer of ordinary talent, but he was equally devoted to the nationalist ideal. Consequently he and Mussorgsky were friends, and when Hartmann died at the age of 39 and a memorial exhibition of his works was held in St. Petersburg -- this was in the fall of 1874 -- Mussorgsky attended, selected ten of the pictures on exhibition as springboards or pretexts for piano pieces of his own, and thereby immortalized Hartmann in a completely falsified guise.

Hartmann's ideas were modest, essentially conventional and small-scaled. Mussorgsky's ideas were immense, iconoclastic and grandiose. Mussorgsky made Hartmann over in his own image; and many, seeing Hartmann as Hartmann for the first time, are shocked and disappointed.

Let it be said at once: the pictures commemorated in this exhibition are not huge, romantic canvases in gold frames. They are actually not paintings at all, at least in the ordinary sense of that word. Many are architectural drawings. Some are costume sketches for the ballet, and one is a design for a clock.

Now we don't have to go along with this all the way. The pictures we can see don't strike me as exactly "conventional" (I think you could get away with calling them "weird"), and "grandiose" as Mussorgsky's imagination may have been, his musical pictures are in fact immensely "small-scaled." (It also seems worth considering that Mussorgsky may actually have known his friend better than Mr. F.)

As I wrote in last night's preview, Mussorgsky's musical pictures are such tiny, finely chiseled miniatures that at least in my experience they tend to whiz by too quickly for proper appreciation, which is why I'd like to really take our time with them, to allow each to really register.

Just to clarify (I hope!) the numeration, although it' may be fair to say that Mussorgsky composed ten "pictures," they actually represent (as best I can tell) 12 pictures of Hartmann. The two Sandomir Jews of No. 6 come from separate portraits, and while the two Latin-titled pictures of No. 8, "Catacombæ (Sepulcrum romanum)" and "Cum mortuis in lingua mortua, are written to be performed continuously.

Mussorgsky gave numbers only to the ten "pictures." (The titles I've settled on are sort of trans-lingual hybrids of his and Ravel's.) He gave no title to the four "promenades" that follow the opening one, which presumably offer snapshots of the exhibition-goer. The last Promenade, between Nos. 6 and 7, was omitted by Ravel, and is omitted by many (most?) pianists. Of the three pianists we'll be hearing from -- Byron Janis, William Kapell, and Sviatoslav Richter -- only Kapell includes it.

ABOUT OUR PERFORMANCES

First, let me say that I decided to do these posts entirely from recordings on hand, with nothing downloaded or specially bought, except a replacement for my copy of the Mercury CD, which I'd allowed to get beaten up, and decided I really wanted to have in more playable condition. Although Pictures isn't a piece I've collected intensively, I think I've "made do" pretty well.

The piano versions. Janis's Mercury recording, which somehow didn't get released for more than 30 years after it was made, seems to me extraordinary for the unforced ease with which everything is in place, and flows. I'm floored by the beauty as well as clear definition of the runs and the nevertheless delicate and nuanced soft playing (listen to the children playing in "Tuileries"), in general the beautiful balancing of chords. The 1953 Kapell recording, which as I noted last night is a private recording of the 1953 Melbourne broadcast and so in less-than-ideal sound, is somewhat freer and grander in scale. The Richter live performance from Sofia, while also in less than state-of-the-art sound even for 1958, is one of the great piano recordings, by turns tempestuous and poetic.

The Ravel orchestration. We have three conductors -- Fritz Reiner, George Szell, and Herbert von Karajan (in what we might call mid-career) -- who could hardly be less alike in temperament and the kind of orchestral sound they cultivated. I think those differences speak loudly and clearly for themselves.

The Stokowski orchestration. Although I see that there are now a host of recordings, I have only two, the 1965 Stokowski (originally a Decca Phase-4 recording) and Matthias Bamert's, so I've made Stokowski's do double duty. In any case, solid a conductor as Bamert unquestionably is, I think the difference between his rendering and Stoky's (made when he was 83!) is startling. A lot of conductors like to perform Stokowski's arrangements and orchestrations, but the results rarely sound like his.

I WOULDN'T PRESUME TO TELL YOU WHAT TO HEAR,
BUT HERE ARE A FEW WORDS ABOUT WHAT I HEAR

I think it's great fun to hear the highly individual emphases and predilections of Ravel and Stokowski as arranger-orchestrators, but when I listen to Pictures I'm more struck by how much I'm hearing the same thing in the piano and orchestral versions, always allowing for the emphases and predilections of the performers. Music lovers you know this music first in orchestral guise are likely to assume that many of the "effects" are added by the orchestrator, but going back to the piano original for me reveals how much the orchestrators are attempting to reproduce effects that are already there.

I think it's worth noting some of what Byron Janis had to say in a booklet note for the belated issue of his Mercury Pictures recording, coupled on CD with a recording of Mussorgsky-Ravel by Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony:

Besides being a brilliant pianist, Mussorgsky was reportedly an extremely good actor. This latter ability is very evident in the score, and the pianist who assumes this added role will surely give an extra dimension of needed theatricality to the performance and communicate a vital part of its heartbeat.

The piano is treated here as the percussive instrument it basically is. (Even the one lyrical picture -- "The Old Castle" -- has a bass accompaniment of a punctuated character.) The writing is of such a stark and sparse nature that it is hard to imagine that the music could burst through. Only a composer of Mussorgsky's genius could accomplish that in this unusual underwritten style.

The orchestration of Ravel is, of course, superb. (An interesting undertaking from a man who had a horror of any of his own works being tampered with in any way. Jacques Thibaud told me Ravel absolutely refused to listen to a Thibaud transcription of Tzigane!) But I have always felt that where the softer colors are required in the Pictures -- and there are quite a lot of p and pp markings in the score -- the piano has the ability of intimacy and color that is hard to obtain with the complexity of orchestration, which tends to magnify the dynamics. (Mussorgsky was known to be very fond of subtle coloration.) Where the fortissimo sonorities occur, the orchestration has an advantage, but that depends very much on the pianist, and very much on his piano as well.

OKAY NOW, HERE WE GO . . .

The performances we're going to hear are on our walk-through are:

piano version: Byron Janis, piano. Mercury, recorded September 1961
Ravel orchestration: Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded Dec. 7, 1957
Stokowski orchestration: BBC Philharmonic, Matthias Bamert, cond. Chandos/MHS, recorded June 28-29, 1995

Promenade
No. 1, Gnomus

Bars 3-4 of the opening "Promenade"

Of the lumbering "Promenade" Alfred Frankenstein says: "This is intended to suggest the composer himself walking about from picture to picture in the gallery. The theme waddles in 11/4 time, for Mussorgsky was no sylph." (In the old published edition, as we can see from the musical example, the composer's extremely unusual 11/4 meter is broken down into paired bars of 5/4, itself an unusual and rather ungainly rhythm, and 6/4. There's now a critical edition presenting more or less what Mussorgsky actually wrote.) Of "Gnomus" Frankenstein says: Hartmann had made a design for a carved wooden nutcracker in the form of a little gnome; it cracked the nuts in its movable jaws (this is precisely the kind of nutcracker celebrated in Tchaikovsky's ballet). Mussorgsky's music depicts a twitching, jumping little man.

piano version -- Byron Janis, piano