Pictures at an Exhibition, Op. 35
Modest Mussorgsky  (1839-1881) / Orch. Maurice Ravel

[1874]

Modest Mussorgsky was a military cadet with a knack for the piano when, at age 19, he dedicated himself to composing music. The highpoint of his short career came in 1874, with the successful premiere of his opera Boris Godunov. That same year, a memorial retrospective of paintings by his friend Viktor Hartmann, who had recently died from an aneurysm at age 39, inspired Mussorgsky to compose Pictures at an Exhibition. The suite for solo piano adopted a novel form in which a recurring promenade represents the composer strolling through the exhibit, linking the movements inspired by specific images.

Five years after Mussorgsky’s death, his friend and fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov arranged for a posthumous publication of the original piano version. The music is best known through the orchestral version heard here, created in 1922 by Maurice Ravel.

The “Promenade” struts to an irregular gait in groups of five and six beats. The next movement, “The Gnome,” celebrates Hartmann’s design for a gnome-shaped nutcracker, depicted with halting phrases and brittle ensemble effects.

A gentle restatement of the promenade leads to “The Old Castle,” evoking a medieval troubadour represented by the dreamy buzz of a solo alto saxophone. Another fragment of promenade ushers in “Tuileries,” based on a painting of children in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. The recurring motif of a descending minor third captures the musical gesture with which children tease and call each other.

“Cattle” recalls a painting of an ox-drawn cart, casting the tuba’s sullen melody over plodding accompaniment. An interlude of promenade material links into the “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks,” inspired by Hartmann’s sketch for a costume in which only the dancer’s head, arms, and legs emerge from an eggshell. Flitting grace notes and bright treble instruments maximize the chirping playfulness.

“Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle” represents two separate portraits of Jewish men, one rich and one poor. The first theme in octaves rings with Semitic intervals and inflections, while a second chorale-like passage, peppered with muted trumpet, offsets the initial incantation.

“The Marketplace at Limoges” transports the animated chatter of female shoppers engaged in frenetic crosstalk. At the climax, it breaks off into the deep, slow resonance of “The Catacombs,” drawn from a self-portrait of Hartmann in the depths of Paris. The next section, “Cum mortuis in lingua mortua” (“With the Dead in a Dead Language”), brings the composer into the picture through a spectral recollection of the promenade theme. As Mussorgsky wrote, “The creative spirit of the dead Hartmann leads me towards the skulls, invokes them; the skulls begin to glow softly from within.”

From that most hallowed place, the exhibition proceeds to the most outlandish movement, “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs.” Hartmann’s design for a clock modeled after the bird-legged house of the witch Baba-Yagá inspired Mussorgsky to depict the folk tale, where the witch flies around in the mortar she uses to grind human bones. That whirlwind music pivots in an instant to the most grand and majestic passage in the piece, “The Great Gate of Kiev,” reflecting Hartmann’s winning design for a ceremonial gate for the Ukrainian capital.

Two piccolos, three flutes, three oboes, English horn, two clarinets, alto saxophone, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, celesta, strings