60th birthday concert (II)

Pictures at an Exhibition (Mussorgsky/Ravel)

Only one month to go before Salomon’s 60th Anniversary concert at St John’s Smith Square. Tickets are available from St John’s and via the link on our website: https://www.salomonorchestra.org/

The concert will open with Michal Oren conducting the fanfare Martyn Brabbins has written especially for the occasion—A Birthday Greeting—followed by Ravel’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

Originally composed in 1874 as a piano suite in ten movements, plus promenade interludes, Pictures at an Exhibition is a musical depiction of walking around an actual exhibition of works by the architect and painter Viktor Hartmann. The exhibition, held at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, followed his sudden death the previous year. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual work, some of which are lost.

The composition became a showpiece for virtuoso pianists but is more widely known from the various orchestrations produced by other composers and contemporaries. Maurice Ravel's 1922 adaptation is the most well-known and the version Salomon is playing. The suite is widely considered one of Mussorgsky's greatest works.

The composition is based on pictures by the artist, architect, and designer Viktor Hartmann. It was probably in 1868 that Mussorgsky first met Hartmann, not long after the latter's return to Russia from abroad. Both men were devoted to the cause of an intrinsically Russian art and quickly became friends. They likely met in the home of the influential critic Vladimir Stasov, who followed their careers with interest. According to Stasov, in 1868, Hartmann gave Mussorgsky two pictures that later formed the basis of Pictures at an Exhibition.

Hartmann's sudden death on 4 August 1873 shook Mussorgsky and others in the Russian art world. The loss of his friend, aged only 39, plunged Mussorgsky into deep despair. In 1874, Stasov helped to organise a memorial exhibition of over 400 Hartmann works in the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. Mussorgsky lent the two pictures Hartmann had given him and visited the exhibition. In June of that year, Mussorgsky was inspired to compose Pictures at an Exhibition, completing the score in just three weeks.

The music depicts his tour of the exhibition. Each of the ten movements is a musical illustration of an individual work by Hartmann interspersed with the promenade theme as he walks from picture to picture.

The ten pictures are:

1. Gnomus

2. Vecchio Castello

3. Tuileries

4. Bydlo

5. Ballet of the chicks in their shells

6. Samuel Goldenburg and Schmuyle

7. Limoges: the Market Place

8. Catacombae: Sepulcrum Romanum

9. The hut on fowl's legs: Baba Yaga

10. The Great Gate of Kiev

Samuel Goldenburg and Schmuyle is probably based on two Hartmann pictures which are, it must be acknowledged, blatantly anti-Semitic portrayals of two Jews: rich, fat Samuel Goldenburg and the snivelling, complaining Schmuyle. Ravel exploited the G-string of the violins to describe Goldenburg's expansive gestures and used a muted trumpet to convey Schmuyle's increasingly strident, nasal tones.

The final movement - The Great Gate of Kiev - is arguably the best-known of all Mussorgsky's music. Of course, Kiev is now referred to by its Ukrainian spelling: Kyiv. But this title is a mistranslation from the original Russian: "The Bogatyr Gates (In the Capital of Kyiv)" is more accurate. This movement is based on a design Hartmann had entered into an architectural competition for a monumental gate to commemorate an escape by the Czar from an unsuccessful assassination attempt. While the design was never realised, Mussorgsky was inspired to portray the passage of a grand procession through the proposed Great Gate.

So, in this masterful realisation by one of the great orchestrators, Ravel has provided us with a piece of symphonic music full of colour, from clucking hens to the grandeur of an extravagant procession. But more than this, Pictures at an Exhibition is an expression of love by Modest Mussorgsky for his dear friend Viktor Hartmann.