Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) was a military cadet with a knack for the piano when, at age 19, he dedicated himself to composition and took his first serious lessons. 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 Viktor Hartmann, who had recently died from an aneurysm at age 39, inspired his good friend 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.
For their 50th Anniversary season, Orpheus commissioned Jannina Norpoth to magnify the overlooked details in Mussorgsky’s original piano score for this new arrangement for chamber orchestra. Norpoth draws heavily on her background as a violinist and chamber musician in the experimental PUBLIQuartet to create an intricate soundscape, utilizing extended techniques to support each movement's imagery.
The iconic Promenade struts to an irregular gait, grouped into five- and six-beat segments. This theme represents the ambling composer, and the slightly imbalanced heft of the music seems a good match for the outsized Mussorgsky.
The next movement, Gnomus, celebrates Hartmann’s design for a gnome-shamed nutcracker, depicted with halting phrases and brittle ensemble effects. Norpoth uses snap (Bartok) pizzicati in the strings to evoke the sound of cracking nuts and wood, while glassy harmonics, slides, and ponticello reflect the strange and magical figure of the gnome.
A gentle restatement of the promenade prepares The Old Castle, evoking an image of a troubadour singing before a medieval castle. Another fragment of Promenade ushers in Tuileries (Dispute between Children at Play), based on Hartmann’s painting of children in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. The recurring motive of a descending minor third captures the universal musical gesture with which children tease and call each other.
In Cattle, Norpoth employs col legno and pizzicato to conjure the wooden wheels and the clopping of hooved feet of an ox-drawn cart. The use of the low registers on all the instruments evokes a slow-moving animal, tired after a long journey.
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. Norpoth employs the flute and oboe to represent birdlike tweets and maximizes the chirping playfulness in the strings with dizzying slides in the violas and violins.
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 offsets the initial incantation.
The Market at Limoges (The Great News) 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, With the Dead in a Dead Language, brings the composer into the picture through a spectral recollection of the Promenade theme. As Mussorgsky wrote in the margin of his score, “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 (Baba-Yagá). Hartmann’s design for a clock modeled after the bird-legged house of the witch Baba-Yagá inspired Mussorgsky to depict another component of the folk tale, where the witch flies around in the mortar she uses to grind up the human bones she eats. 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.
© 2022 Orpheus Chamber Orchestra