04/23/2023
MSO Masterworks Season Finale! Monday, April 24, 7:30pm at the Davis Theatre. Come to the Pre-Concert chat with Maestro Reeves at 6:30pm to hear more about the music!
Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/o/montgomery-symphony-orchestra-54815016853
Mussorgsky/Ravel – Pictures at an Exhibition
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) was born and lived most of his life in St. Petersburg. A quirky but highly original genius, Mussorgsky was part of the circle of composers around Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov who became known as “The Mighty Handful,” or “The Five.” (For trivia buffs, the other three were Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui and Alexander Borodin.) The composers of The Five were interested in creating a truly Russian style in their music, although each tried to achieve this goal in his own way. Mussorgsky’s way was to avoid the traditional “Germanic” forms in favor of a style that emphasized direct, emotional, and realistic expression.
Mussorgsky composed Pictures at an Exhibition for solo piano in 1874. The pictures are those of his friend, the architect/painter/designer Victor Hartmann, who had died the previous year. Some of the pictures were part of a retrospective exhibition mounted in Hartmann’s honor, while others were part of the composer’s personal collection. Mussorgsky sought to memorialize Hartmann by interpreting some of his friend’s best pictures in music. Unfortunately, most of the pictures are now lost and one-to-one correspondences between pictures and the movements of Mussorgsky’s suite are fairly speculative. The orchestration by Maurice Ravel was commissioned in 1920 by the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. It was not the first such arrangement of the work, nor the last, for Koussevitzky retained exclusive performance rights on his own version until 1929, and subsequently charged huge fees for its use. Hence several others—including the conductor Leopold Stokowski—made their own orchestral versions of the work. Nevertheless, Ravel’s version has become the most popular, and it is so familiar that it even influences the way in which pianists play the original.
-Dr. Mark Benson, MSO Principal Percussionist, Associate Professor of Music- Auburn University Montgomery
