Sunday Classics: Concluding our walking tour through Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition"

Why don't we begin at the very end? We launched last week's Pictures preview with Esa-Pekka Salonen (whom we'd last heard conducting Stravinsky's Firebird) and the Philharmonia Orchestra opening the Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures, so it seems only right to have them bring the piece to this stirring conclusion with "The Hut on Fowl's Legs" and "The Great Gate of Kiev" (the best thing I've ever heard Salonen do, I have to say) from that 2006 Proms performance.

by Ken

If there's one lesson I take away from the time we've spent with Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, last week (preview and main post) and this (starting with last night's preview), it's that performers of these vividly imagined miniatures need to be operating at a comparable level of awareness and imagination, whether they're tackling the original piano version or Ravel's or anyone else's orchestral version. Esa-Pekka Salonen's performance of the concluding "Hut on Fowl's Legs" and "Great Gate at Kiev" in the clip above is a splendid demonstration. This is by no means the only way to do the music, but the choices are all fully imagined and executed. I doubt that anyone who hears this performance is going to forget the music anytime soon.

I'm not sure there's much more to say of an introductory nature. We're continuing with the game plan aid out last week: walking through Mussorgsky's musical rendering of pictures from the posthumous of work by his friend Viktor Hartmann -- in the composer's piano version and, among the many orchestral versions that have been attempted, the most-often-encountered one, by the composer Maurice Ravel, and the one by master orchestral colorist Leopold Stokowski.

From last night's Part 2 preview, we've heard how today's half-Pictures begins (with No. 6, "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle" movement) and ends (with the rousing No. 10, "The Great Gate of Kiev"). In a moment we'll fill in the missing three (really four) pictures. Note that this week we're proceeding from picture to picture without benefit of those "promenades" Mussorgsky inserted between most of the earlier pictures. Note that there actually is one more Promenade, between No. 6 and No. 7, "Limoges -- The Marketplace," which Ravel omitted and many pianists do as well. Our Pictures companion William Kapell included it, however, and we'll hear it in place in his performance below. When we get to that point in our walk-through, we're going to have pianist Michel Béroff play it for us.

Before we resume out promenade through the exhibition, since we heard the start of Vladimir Horowitz's extravagant rendering of Pictures last week, I thought it would be fun to hear him bring it to a close with "The Hut with Fowl Legs" and "The Great Gate at Kiev."



NOW, TO BEGIN THE WALK-THROUGH OF
OUR SECOND HALF-PICTURES, CLICK HERE.

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Sunday Classics preview: Preparing to conclude our walk-through of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition"

Here's how it all turns out in the Emerson, Lake & Palmer rendering.

by Ken

Last week we began our walking tour through Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, the suite of miniature pieces the composer imagined for solo piano depicting an exhibition of "pictures" by his late friend, the architect and artist Viktor Hartmann.

Since we pick up with "picture" No. 6, a musical amalgamation of Hartmann pencil drawings of two Polish Jews, I thought that for our preview we would start there and jump to the final "picture," the magisterial "Great Gate of Kiev." Here, by the way, is how "The Great Gate" sounds in a suitably grand performance of the Ravel orchestral version, with Stuart Stratford conducting the London Philharmonic, from a "FUNharmonic Family Concert" in London's Royal Festival Hall, February 2008.




TO CONTINUE WITH OUR PREVIEW OF THE
SECOND HALF OF PICTURES, CLICK HERE.

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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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Sunday Classics preview: Preparing for our first encounter with Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition"

The first and second "promenades" bracket the first "picture" in Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra in this August 2006 Proms concert.

by Ken

All told, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition doesn't run much more than a half-hour. So why are we splitting it in two? (As I mentioned last night, we are splitting it in two -- the first half in tomorrow's post, the second half next week.) Simple: I want to "slow the music down." These miniatures are remarkably precisely etched, but they are miniatures, and can pass in not much more than the blink of an eye. I know that the music tends to blur for me, and I thought it might be helpful to others as well to, well, slow the thing down.

We're going to be considering three versions of Pictures: Mussorgsky's solo-piano original, the near-standard orchestral version produced by the great composer Maurice Ravel, and a quite different orchestral version produced by the orchestral wizard Leopold Stokowski -- though in tonight's and next Saturday's previews we're going to limit our listening to the first two.

Right away we're going to sample a performance I think you'll agree is radically different from the one we just heard. To my hearing, the differences have much less to do with the different "media" -- piano original vs. Ravel orchestration -- than with these particular performers' radically different ways of hearing and imagining the music.


This chunk of Pictures, from a live performance given in the ancient Roman theater of Orange, goes farther into the suite than the Salonen clip above, running not quite through the second picture, "The Old Castle."


TO PROCEED WITH OUR PREVIEW SAMPLING
OF PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION, CLICK HERE.

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[1/30/2011] Concluding our walking tour through Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" (continued)

READY? OKAY, HERE WE GO!

Again, our performers (for notes on the performances, see last week's post) 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

No. 6, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle
(Two Polish Jews -- One Rich, the Other Poor)

Hartmann, we're always told, had a thing about the medieval city of Sandomir ("Sandomierz" in Polish; "one of the oldest and historically most significant cities in Poland," on a cliff overlooking the Vistula River near the junction of the San, in what's now southeastern Poland -- bear in mind how movable national boundaries in this region have been through the centuries of "modern" European history), in particular for the Jewish ghetto.

The pencil drawings of the two Sandomir Jews on which this "picture" is based were apparently actually owned by Mussorgsky. In his musicalization, which we've already heard in last night's preview, he imagined this unharmonious encounter between the haughty, portly rich Jew and the whining beggar.

piano version -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration -- Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration -- Matthias Bamert, cond.

THE "MISSING" PROMENADE BETWEEN NOS. 6 AND 7

This is the "walking" connector between Nos. 6 and 7, omitted by Ravel in his orchestral edition, and also by many (most?) pianists performing Mussorgsky's own version. I thought we'd hear it first by itself -- as you'll hear, it doesn't really add anything to what we've already heard -- and then as the link between "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle" and "Limoges -- The Marketplace." (I'm not necessarily endorsing this performance by the then-25-year-old Michel Béroff. I just happen to have it. Probably we should also hear at the very least Béroff's handling of the opening Promenade, so we can hear how he relates this one to the earlier ones, but even I have limits to my openness to digression. Really!)

The "missing" Promenade by itself

No. 6, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle
Promenade
No. 7, Limoges -- The Marketplace

Michel Béroff, piano. EMI, recorded c 1975

No. 7, Limoges -- The Marketplace

This is apparently a musical composite of numerous sketches Hartmann made of Limoges. Clearly, as with the other "French" picture, "Tuileries" (No. 3), the bustling marketplace affords Mussorgsky some welcome up-tempo musical contrast with the surrounding "pictures." Note that this picture is written to lead directly into the next, "Catacombs."

piano version -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration -- Fritz Reiner, cond.

omitted by Stokowski


No. 8, Catacombs (Sepulcrum romanum)
Cum mortuis in lingua mortua

In his Angel liner note for the Béroff Pictures from which we heard the "missing" promenade, Rory Guy offers this background for the pair of pictures combined here:

Hartmann himself, a friend, and a guide holding a lantern visit the interior of the Paris catacombs. The second part of the piece is the "Promenade" music transfigured. It bears a marginal note: "Latin text: With the dead in a dead language. The creative spirit of the dead Harmann leads me toward the skulls and speaks to them. They begin to glow from within with a gentle luminescence."

piano version -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration -- Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration -- Matthias Bamert, cond.



No. 9, The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba Yaga)

Of course "The Great Gate of Kiev" makes for a grand climax to Pictures, but I'm not sure the most dramatic "picture" isn't this one. Baba Yaga is a folkloric Russian witch famous for dining on crushed-up human bones, and she indeed lived in a hut perched on fowl's legs. (Note that Hartmann's rendering is as a clock!) Rory Guy ventures that the music "seems also to suggest the witch's flight through the night sky in search of mortal prey." Again, this picture is written to run directly into the climactic final one.

piano version -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration -- Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration -- Matthias Bamert, cond.



No. 10, The Great Gate of Kiev

The music itself hardly needs much comment, but for background here's Rory Guy: "A massive gate at Kiev was proposed to commemorate the escape from assassination of Tsar Alexander II, in 1866. It was never built, but Hartmann's six designs for it stimulated Mussorgsky to conceive an even more imposing edifice in music, quoting an ancient liturgical theme, and suggesting a procession, bells, chanting, and triumphant celebration."

piano version -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration -- Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration -- Matthias Bamert, cond.



SUMMING UP TODAY'S PROMENADE:
OUR SECOND "HALF-PICTURES"

Last week we heard what I called a "half-Pictures," gathering the portion of the exhibition we had traversed thus far, in the performances we've been using for our previews: Byron Janis at the keyboard, and George Szell conducting the Ravel orchestral version, plus -- since, again, I don't own a third recording of the Stokowski version -- the master's own 1965 recording of it, split in half. It seems only logical to complete this portion of our program with the second "half-Pictures." At the same time, it seems silly to make you click back to last week's post if, quite reasonably, you happen to want to hear the the first half of these performances as well. So don't tell anybody, but I've discreetly slipped in the first-half files for each.

Promenade
No. 1, Gnomus
Promenade; No. 2, Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle)
Promenade; No. 3, Tuileries (Children's Dispute After Playing)
[omitted by Stokowski]
No. 4, Bydło (Oxen)
Promenade; No. 5, Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks

No. 6, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle
(Two Polish Jews -- One Rich, the Other Poor)
No. 7, Limoges -- The Marketplace
[(a) omitted by Stokowski]
[(b) preceded by a "Promenade" omitted by Ravel and by many pianists, but included by William Kapell]
No. 8, Catacombs (Sepulcrum romanum)
Cum mortuis in lingua mortua
No. 9, The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba Yaga)
No. 10, The Great Gate of Kiev

MUSSORGSKY: Pictures at an Exhibition
(first half)
(second half)
William Kapell, piano. RCA/BMG, private recording of a live broadcast from Melbourne (Australia) Town Hall, July 21, 1953, with the conclusion of "The Great Gate at Kiev" patched in from a recital at the Frick Collection (New York), March 1, 1953

MUSSORGSKY-RAVEL: Pictures at an Exhibition
(first half)
(second half)

Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic/Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 30, 1963

MUSSORGSKY-STOKOWSKI: Pictures at an Exhibition
(first half -- "Tuileries" omitted)
(second half -- "Limoges -- The Marketplace" omitted)
New Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. Decca, recorded 1965


NOW, ALL TOGETHER, LET'S WALK THROUGH
THE WHOLE EXHIBITION -- THREE TIMES!

Promenade
No. 1, Gnomus
Promenade; No. 2, Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle)
Promenade; No. 3, Tuileries (Children's Dispute After Playing)
[omitted by Stokowski]
No. 4, Bydło (Oxen)
Promenade; No. 5, Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks
No. 6, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle
(Two Polish Jews -- One Rich, the Other Poor)
No. 7, Limoges -- The Marketplace [omitted by Stokowski]
No. 8, Catacombs (Sepulcrum romanum)
Cum mortuis in lingua mortua
No. 9, The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba Yaga)
No. 10, The Great Gate of Kiev

MUSSORGSKY: Pictures at an Exhibition
Sviatoslav Richter, piano. Columbia/Philips, recorded live in Sofia, 1958

MUSSORGSKY-RAVEL: Pictures at an Exhibition
Philharmonia Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded Oct. 1955 and June 1956

MUSSORGSKY-STOKOWSKI: Pictures at an Exhibition
New Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. Decca, recorded 1965


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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[1/29/2011] Preview: Preparing to conclude our walk-through of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" (continued)

Old business/new business: This chunk of Sergiu Celibidache's 1980 performance with the London Symphony picks up with the final chords of "Bydło" (No. 4), then continues at 0:17 with the Promenade that leads to the "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks" (No. 5) at 1:17, all from our installment last week. Wthis week's installment begins with "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle" (No. 6) at 2:39, the continues with "Limoges -- The Marketplace" (No. 7) at 5:38 and "Catacombs" (from No. 7) at 7:07.


NOW, AS PROMISED . . .

We hear our "preview" team -- William Kapell performing the piano version, George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra performing the Ravel orchestral version -- in the first and last of tomorrow's second-half pictures.


No. 6, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle
(Two Polish Jews, One Rich and the Other Not)
piano version
William Kapell, piano. RCA/BMG, private recording of a live broadcast from Melbourne (Australia) Town Hall, July 21, 1953
Ravel orchestration
Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic/Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 30, 1963


"Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle" (No. 6) is performed by pianist Mina Ivanova.


No. 10, The Great Gate of Kiev
piano version
William Kapell, piano. RCA/BMG, private recording of a live broadcast from Melbourne (Australia) Town Hall, July 21, 1953, with the final section patched in from a Frick Collection (New York) recital, March 1, 1953
Ravel orchestration
Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic/Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 30, 1963


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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[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

Ravel orchestration -- Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration -- Matthias Bamert, cond.



Promenade
No. 2, Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle)

Frankenstein: "A troubador sings a serenade before an old castle in Italy. This was based on a watercolor of an old Italian castle which Hartmann made as a student."


piano version -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration -- Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration -- Matthias Bamert, cond.



Promenade
No. 3, Tuileries (Children's Dispute After Playing)

The picture, now lost depicted, according to the program of critic Vladimir Stasov, "an avenue in the garden of the Tuileries, with a swarm of children and nurses."

piano version -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration -- Fritz Reiner, cond.

omitted by Stokowski


No. 4, Bydło (Oxen)

Frankenstein: "The title is a Polish word meaning 'cattle.' Hartmann's picture was of a huge Polish oxcart lumbering down a muddy road. The music grows loud as the cart passes by and softens into the distance as it disappears."

piano version -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration -- Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration -- Matthias Bamert, cond.



Promenade
No. 5, Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks
(Ballet of the Chickens in Their Shells)

Alfred Frankenstein: "A costume sketch for a ballet called Trilbi, produced in St. Petersburg in 1871. The plot of this had nothing to do with George du Maurier's famous novel Trilby but was based upon a story by the French novelist Charles Nodier. Actually, the plot has nothing to do with this particular costume sketch. For reasons best known to himself, the choreographer, Marius Petipa, brought a whole convention of birds onto the stage in Trilbi, and the children of the Russian Imperial Ballet School appeared as chicks just emerging from their shells. Mussorgsky's music is a little, cheeping scherzo."

piano version -- -- Byron Janis, piano

Ravel orchestration -- Fritz Reiner, cond.

Stokowski orchestration -- Matthias Bamert, cond.



RECAPPING OUR STORY SO FAR,
FOR A SORT OF HALF-PICTURES

Next week of course we'll be completing our walk-through of the exhibition, with another Saturday-night preview. But now that we've heard the first five pictures (with their connective promenades), wouldn't it be interesting to hear them the way we would in normal performance, continuously? For the piano and Ravel versions we're hearing the performances we heard in last night's preview (and will hear again in next week's).

MUSSORGSKY: Pictures at an Exhibition:
Promenade
No. 1, Gnomus
Promenade; No. 2, Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle)
Promenade; No. 3, Tuileries (Children's Dispute After Playing)
[omitted by Stokowski]
No. 4, Bydło (Oxen)
Promenade; No. 5, Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks

piano version
William Kapell, piano. RCA/BMG, recorded live in Melbourne (Australia) Town Hall, July 21, 1953
Ravel orchestration
Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic/Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 30, 1963
Stokowski orchestration
New Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. Decca, recorded 1965


SNEAK PEEK: IF YOU CAN'T WAIT TILL
NEXT WEEK TO HEAR THE WHOLE THING . . .

Promenade
No. 1, Gnomus
Promenade; No. 2, Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle)
Promenade; No. 3, Tuileries (Children's Dispute After Playing)
[omitted by Stokowski]
No. 4, Bydło (Oxen)
Promenade; No. 5, Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks
No. 6, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle
(Two Polish Jews -- One Rich, the Other Poor)
No. 7, Limoges -- The Marketplace [omitted by Stokowski]
No. 8, Catacombs (Sepulcrum romanum)
Cum mortuis in lingua mortua
No. 9, The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba Yaga)
No. 10, The Great Gate of Kiev

MUSSORGSKY: Pictures at an Exhibition
Sviatoslav Richter, piano. Columbia/Philips, recorded live in Sofia, 1958
MUSSORGSKY-RAVEL: Pictures at an Exhibition
Philharmonia Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan, cond. EMI, recorded Oct. 1955 and June 1956
MUSSORGSKY-STOKOWSKI: Pictures at an Exhibition
New Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. Decca, recorded 1965


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


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