Sunday Classics: We begin our walk-through of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition"

Emerson, Lake & Palmer have at Pictures at an Exhibition.

by Ken

As I menioned in last night's preview, explaining my choice of "Bydło (Oxen)" and the "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks" as sample "pictures," Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is filled with movement, whether literally so, as in these musical portraits or the rollicking children in "Tuileries" and the bustle of "Limoges -- The Marketplace," or implicitly so, as in all the other movements. You could almost describe Pictures as a study in musical movement. I have no way of saying whether this is owing to Mussorgsky having seen all this movement in the pictures by his deceased friend Viktor Hartmann or to his simply understanding that while a picture can freeze a moment, music can't, but has to move. But I think it's something worth thinking about as we being our walk-through of this exhibition.

It seems pretty incredible, given that for decades now these have been some of the most famous pictures this side of the "Mona Lisa" and maybe a Rembrandt or two, but the music and art critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote in his liner notes for the LP issue of Leopold Stokowski's third and last recording (from 1965) of his own orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition: "The pictures slumbered in Russian archives for fifty years until the writer of these lines discovered them and published them for the first time in the Musical Quarterly for July 1939." He explains:

Mussorgsky had little or no reputation during his lifetime. His Pictures at an Exhibition, composed in 1874, were not published until 1886 (five years after his death) and did not leap into their present widespread popularity until the various orchestrated versions appeared in recent years.

Ravel's orchestral version -- produced in 1922 on commission from Serge Koussevitzky, who gave the first performance in Paris the following year, the year before he began his 25-year tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony -- hasn't quite swept the field. New versions have continued to be produced, including Leopold Stowkowski's (presumably at intervals between its introduction in 1939 and publication in 1971), which aimed for a more authentically "Russian" feeling. Stoky omitted the two unabashedly "French" pictures -- No. 3, "Tuileries," and No. 7, "Limoges -- The Marketplace" -- entirely.

NOW, JUST TO GET US IN THE MOOD . . .


Let's walk! Valery Gergiev conducts the Rotterdam Philharmonic in the opening Promenade of the Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition.

WE'RE ALMOST READY TO BEGIN OUR WALK-
THROUGH OF THE PICTURES. CLICK HERE.


FOR PART 2 OF OUR PICTURES WALK-THROUGH, CLICK HERE.

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