GENERAL HISTORY OF COMPOSER

Mussorgsky was never a truly prolific composer. He wrote three song cycles, a set of musical pictures for piano called Pictures at an Exhibition, two operas, Boris Godunov and the unfinished Khovanshchina, the incomplete play Sorochintsy Fair and the orchestral fantasia St.John's Night on the Bare Mountain for the play The Witch. In 1867 he left the civil service, meaning to earn a living as teacher and accompanist, but took a position in the government's Forestry Department the following year due to financial difficulties. His continuing lapses into alcoholism, drawn from his mixing with wild intellectuals, finally caused his health to deteriorate and forced him to abandon government service in 1880. This finally led to an attack of epilepsy that caused his death in March 1881. His death left much of his work unfinished and the revision and editing of these works were taken up by his colleagues Rimsky-Korsakov and Balakirev, who made Mussorgsky's music more accessible and less original than they were.

Naxos has always had a penchant for offering inexpensive recordings of familiar and rare compositions that are often of high quality and that can be highly recommended along with the best full-price recordings. This is well in evidence with this new recording of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine with Theodor Kuchar at the helm. The great difficulty about the Pictures is in the fact that they have been recorded time and time again. Being Mussorgsky's best known work, along with A Night on the Bare Mountain, it makes fresh discoveries somewhat of a difficulty. However, this is not the case here. The orchestra on this recording plays enthusiastically, with a great sense of discovery and freshness. The recorded sound is clean, crisp and detailed, making for a very enjoyable listen.

This is the more familiar version of the orchestral fantasy, revised by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The work is full of wild dancing, percussion, brassy exclamations and fanfares, with some very devilish action keeping up the excitement. Rimsky's arrangement is much more refined and tightly knit than the original. He also composed a completely new coda for the work, ending with the approach of dawn with church bells ringing in the distance. The work is capped off with a very beautiful Russian melody for flute, played very beautifully and expressively in this recording. This work is probably most familiar to people from Disney's Fantasia of 1940, where the music was accompanied by such hellish visions that would be inconceivable in any current Disney film of today. This recording is also one of the best I have ever heard, well detailed and recorded with exhilarating tempos and wonderful phrasing.

This is another rarity on albums like this. Most Mussorgsky discs like to include the atmospheric Prelude, "Dawn over the Moscow River," instead of anything else from the opera Khovanschchina. Golitsïn's Exile begins with dissonant brass declamations that is alternated with a melancholy and mournful string-heavy melody, quite appropriate for the setting.

The music of the original version of Night on the Bare Mountain, made in 1867, is more robust, raw and brutal than in the Rimsky's revision. This is plainly apparent from the start of the work with its rolling timpani, cymbals, the more accented use of brass and thicker orchestrations. This in turn gives way to a witches' dance of bucolic energy with their flying brooms bouncing in the air. The music ends in a more bacchanalic fashion, with loud brass blasts. Despite being the original version, it is definitely not better. Although the work begins rather similarly as the Rimsky version, the ensuing music bears little resemblance to that revision. The music lacks the integrity of Rimsky's version, tending to lose interest after a while. What the Rimsky version has in its favour is a more coherent structure, with a powerful first part and a calm and beautiful final part without ever making the music tiresome. The original version on the other hand doesn't really offer anything greatly interesting following the introduction. Still, it makes for an interesting comparison and it is good to note how much Rimsky-Korsakov actually modified the original composition, virtually re-composing the entire piece. An interesting addition to the catalogue, well played and served.

The Pictures at an Exhibition were originally written for piano in 1874 after the death of the architect Victor Hartmann, a friend of Mussorgsky's. Hartmann's death was followed by an exhibition of about 400 of his drawings, sketches, designs and watercolours that inspired Mussorgsky to create a suite of ten pictures as a memorial to his friend. The individual pieces are linked by a recurring melody that Mussorgsky called a "Promenade." In 1922, in response to a commission from Serge Koussevitsky's "Concerts symphoniques," the composer Maurice Ravel, who greatly admired Mussorgsky, took on the job to orchestrate the Pictures using a very colourful palette of orchestral colour that he uses in a very "contemporary" way, thus creating the most popular arrangement of the work known to us. The first performance took place on October 19, 1922. Incidentally Rimsky-Korsakov also orchestrated a number of pieces in 1891 and they were published by a Parisian publisher. These are however almost completely forgotten by now.

8. Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle) (4:23)
"The Old Castle" is a darkly murky serenade, mostly performed by a saxophone solo, giving the music a very melancholy and ancient sound. You can almost picture the decaying old castle and the lonely serenader wrapped in a shroud of memories of the past. The saxophone solo is particularly well handled in this recording.

10. Tuileries (0:56)
This piece represents a group of children playing and quarreling, with nurses gossiping in the park. The music is very light and fast in texture, which is then followed by…

14. Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuyle (2:17)
This picture is actually two pictures of Jews put together. Samuel Goldberg is pompous and arrogant, while Schmuyle is more sneaky and sly. The two Jews then proceed in discussing with each other. In the original piano version this picture was followed by a reprisal of the first "Promenade" but Ravel never included this into his orchestral arrangement.

16. Catacombae: Sepulchrum Romanum (2:04)
The market scene is interrupted by a long, sustained brass note, announcing the descent of Hartmann himself into the catacombs of Paris with a lantern in his hand (here depicted with the most rich underlying sonority). This is the movement that is at the heart of the entire work, a commemoration of the departed friend.

18. La cabane de Baba-Yaga sur des pattes de poule
(The Hut of Baba Yaga on Chicken's Legs) (3:27)
The next picture doesn't actually depict Baba-Yaga's hut in Hartmann's picture, but a grotesque bronze clock (a sketch for a craftsman to work from). Mussorgsky on the other hand wrote a demonic witch's ride, taking as a model the Russian fairytale of Baba-Yaga, who crunches up children's bones and flies through the night sky in a cottage with chicken's legs. The drums are especially impressive in this version.

© berlioz