At a Promenade Concert on Monday, August 19th 1991 we heard Leonard Slatkin's brilliant first compilation from nine different orchestrations of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, a remarkably successful initiative, reminding us, as it did, of how many arrangements there have been of this evocative score. Then he went for extracts from Lawrence Leonard’s version for piano and orchestra, from Ashkenazy, Lucien Cailliet, Sergey Gorchakov, Leonidas Leonardi, Sir Henry Wood, Mikhail Tushmalov, Stokowski and Ravel.
It was the indefatigable Edward Johnson, champion of Leopold Stokowski, we had to thank for getting Slatkin interested and finding some of the scores. Now Slatkin has done it again with a new – in many ways more way-out – compilation including versions by Ellison, Gorchakov, Walter Goehr, Naoumoff, Geert van Keulen, Ashkenazy, Simpson, Cailliet, Wood, Lawrence Leonard, Leo Funtek, Boyd, Ravel and the Australian composer/arranger Douglas Gamley.
Slatkin’s first compilation, although he played it round the world, has never been commercially released, which makes it all the more pleasing to welcome his second version on this CD from the 2004 Proms at the Royal Albert Hall.
Now there are two possible attitudes to orchestrations of Pictures. There is the po-faced "I cannot be having with anything except Ravel" view, or on the other hand, that this colourful score has endless possibilities and most orchestrations give one a new angle on it. If you incline to the first, stop reading now, but if like me you want a sonic adventure, join Leonard Slatkin in this fascinating exploration, starting and ending with absolutely way-out versions, one of which works and one of which doesn’t.
The pictures that inspired Mussorgsky were, of course, by his friend Victor Hartmann (1834-1873), architect, designer and water-colourist, one of that group of artists and musicians who looked to Russia, its folk-song, folk-tales and peasant handicraft as a source of national art in the 1860s. The critic Stassov tells how Hartmann, then in his late twenties, caused a furore when he attended a carnival ball dressed as the witch Baba Yaga. Yet Hartmann was achieving recognition, and in that same year designed the Russian Millenary Monument at Novgorod for which Balakirev's tone-poem Russia was commissioned.
Mussorgsky was stunned by the death of his fertile and brilliant friend at the age of 39, and when a memorial exhibition of Hartmann's work took place in St Petersburg, he quickly responded with four of these familiar piano pieces, soon expanded to ten and linked by interludes (the promenades in which Mussorgsky said that he, himself, could be seen) to become the piano work we know today, first published in 1886.
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MUSSORGSKY Pictures RESPIGHI Pines WARNER 2564 61954-2 [LF]: Classical CD Reviews- August 2005 MusicWeb-International
Read the rest of the review, by Lewis Foreman, here -- musicweb-international.com
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