Pictures at an Exhibition (orchestration Ravel)

Program notes

About the Work

In August 1873 the Russian architect and painter Viktor Hartmann died suddenly at the age of 39. He had been a close friend of Modest Mussorgsky, and the loss hit the composer hard. Early the following year the critic Vladimir Stasov helped to organise a memorial exhibition of more than 400 of Hartmann’s works at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg: not grand oil paintings for the most part, but architectural drawings, stage and costume designs, travel sketches and designs for household objects. Mussorgsky went, and in June 1874 he wrote, very quickly, a set of piano pieces in which he pictures himself walking through the show.

Ten of the pieces describe pictures. Between them comes a recurring “Promenade”, the music of the visitor moving from one exhibit to the next, which changes mood according to what he has just seen. The cycle is dedicated to Stasov, whose descriptions are now the main record of what the pictures showed, since many of them are lost.

The work was not printed until 1886, five years after his death, in an edition by his friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. For decades it remained little known. The version that made it famous is the one heard in these concerts. Maurice Ravel orchestrated the cycle in 1922 for the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who introduced it in Paris that October and kept exclusive rights to it for some years. Ravel was not the first to orchestrate the Pictures and was far from the last, but his version is the one that has lasted. He left out one of the Promenades, the one before “Limoges”; otherwise he follows Mussorgsky closely.

What to Listen For

Promenade. A solo trumpet, answered by the brass choir. The tune keeps changing its metre, like someone walking at an uneven pace.

Gnomus. A design for a toy or nutcracker in the shape of a gnome with crooked legs: lurching, stop-start music.

The Old Castle. A troubadour sings before a medieval castle. Ravel gives the song to an alto saxophone, over a bass note that never moves.

Tuileries. Children squabbling in the Paris gardens, in quick woodwind chatter.

Bydło. A Polish ox-cart on huge wheels. In Ravel’s version the heavy, trudging melody begins quietly, swells as the cart passes and fades into the distance.

Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks. A costume design for a ballet in which children danced in eggshells. High woodwinds peck and cluck.

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle. Two portraits, one of a rich man and one of a poor man. The first voice is weighty and self-assured, the second high, stammering and pleading, and then the two are heard together.

Limoges, the Market. Market women quarrelling at top speed. The music runs straight into the next picture.

Catacombs. Hartmann drew himself examining the Paris catacombs by lantern light. Stark brass chords are followed by “With the Dead in a Dead Language”, in which the Promenade theme returns, hushed, over shivering strings.

The Hut on Fowl’s Legs. A clock in the form of the hut of the witch Baba Yaga. Mussorgsky adds her flight in a mortar, in ferocious, driving music.

The Great Gate of Kiev. Hartmann’s design for a city gate in the old Russian style, with a cupola shaped like a helmet. A broad hymn alternates with quiet chant-like passages, the Promenade is heard once more among the sounds of bells, and the main theme returns, slower and grander each time, to close the work.