Three Movements from Pictures at an Exhibition

Modest Mussorgksy (1839-1881)

Three Movements from Pictures at an Exhibition

orchestrated by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Promenade

The Hut on Chickens’ Legs (Baba Yaga)

The Great Gate of Kiev

Although it was little appreciated in its original piano version until long after the composer’s death, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition has been an irresistible challenge to composers and conductors who fancy themselves as orchestrators for well over a hundred years. It was inspired by an exhibition in St Petersburg in 1874 of paintings and drawings by the composer’s architect friend Victor Hartmann, who had died the year before. Mussorgsky’s reactions to what he saw there are so vividly descriptive of the scenes and characters depicted in the various exhibits that - for all their startling originality as piano pieces - they seem to cry out for the resources of the full orchestra. No orchestral version has been anywhere near as successful, however, as the one commissioned from Maurice Ravel by Serge Koussevitsky in 1922.

Mussorgsky does more here than just string together a series of little tone poems. An essential element in the greatness of the work is that he sees himself, as a close friend of the late architect, in the exhibition too. You can hear him, rather short and somewhat overweight at more than fifteen stones, walking from picture to picture in the stout harmonies and rolling gait of the Promenade. The last-but-one-picture is the nightmarishly fierce Hut on Chickens’ Legs, the home according to ancient Russian legend of the man-eating witch Baba Yaga. It leads directly into a musical glorification of one of Hartmann’s grandest architectural projects, a design for a great gate at Kiev, which was never built but which is more impressive as a monument in music - as it mingles the Promenade theme with a Slavonic hymn and sonorously tolling bells - than it could have been in stone.