Stokowski omitted ‘Tuileries’ and ‘Limoges’, finding them too Frenchified. The only significant challenger is Leopold Stokowski’s 1939 version, painted in gaudy colours. Other orchestrations followed, but Ravel’s version has remained the predominant one – both in the concert hall and on disc – and it is the sole consideration in this Collection. Koussevitzky’s opening Promenade lurches in tempo, as does the closing ‘Great Gate of Kiev’, but it’s fascinating to hear how quickly ‘Bydło’ is taken.

The tea-tray percussion is recessed, the alto saxophone in ‘The Old Castle’ is woolly and the solo trumpet for Schmuÿle sounds anaemic. He held exclusivity rights over Ravel’s orchestration for six years, so it’s no surprise that he also made the first recording, with the Boston Symphony in 1930. On October 19, 1922, Serge Koussevitzky conducted the premiere at the Paris Opéra. How ironic that Ravel turned out to have been working from an edition of the piano score edited by Rimsky! Little harm was done, though the only significant differences are Ravel’s pianissimo start to ‘Bydło’ (Mussorgsky had the ox-cart enter fortissimo), plus the final cadence of ‘Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle’, which Rimsky had ‘corrected’ to C-D flat-C-B flat from Mussorgsky’s more angular C-D flat-B flat-B flat (Toscanini restores Mussorgsky’s intentions here, as does Lorin Maazel in his two recordings). ‘Mussorgsky’s alleged incorrections are sheer strokes of genius,’ Ravel said in a 1929 interview, ‘very different from the blunders of a writer lacking linguistic sense or of a composer lacking harmonic sense.’ Arturo Toscanini regarded Ravel’s version as a genuine treatise on orchestration, on a par with Berlioz’s. Ravel had orchestrated Mussorgsky before, assisting Igor Stravinsky on parts of Khovanshchina at Serge Diaghilev’s request in 1913, so he was already deeply immersed in Mussorgsky’s style. Henry Wood orchestrated Pictures in 1915 – it was programmed three times in that year’s Proms season, including the Last Night – but he withdrew it when the new version appeared, in deference to Ravel’s masterly work.Īnd it is masterly. Mikhail Tushmalov, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, made the first orchestration (1891) but it omits several pictures and promenades. Enter Maurice Ravelįew people paid much attention to Pictures until the émigré Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Maurice Ravel to make an orchestration nearly 50 years later. Marked nel modo russico (‘in the Russian manner’), it is an ungainly theme, alternating 5/4 and 6/4 metres, ‘an awkward, waddly rhythm’, wrote Alfred Frankenstein, adding pithily, ‘Mussorgsky was no sylph’.

‘My physiognomy,’ he explained, ‘can be seen in the intermezzi.’ These are the short promenades that link several pictures, a ‘framing device’ (pun intended) as if Mussorgsky were sauntering from one painting to the next. I’m devouring it all, gorging on it, and I barely have time to scribble them on paper.’ In June 1874 he wrote to Stasov: ‘ Hartmann is boiling as Boris boiled: the air is thick with its sounds and its ideas. Mussorgsky lent drawings from his own collection and resolved to write a descriptive piano suite – black-and-white reproductions, if you will – inspired by 10 of Hartmann’s works. The following spring, around 400 of Hartmann’s works – oil paintings, watercolours, pencil sketches, designs – were displayed in a memorial exhibition at the St Petersburg Society of Architects. ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, live on and creatures like Hartmann must die!’

‘My dear friend, what a terrible blow!’ he wrote to the critic Vladimir Stasov. Hartmann was even younger than Mussorgsky when he died of an aneurysm in 1873, aged only 39. It’s a portrait that desolately stares out at us on countless LP and CD covers. It’s ironic that Repin’s portrait is far better known than any of the works by Mussorgsky’s dear friend Viktor Hartmann, which were the inspiration for his 1874 piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. There was no space for Repin to use an easel so he had to perch at a desk near the armchair where his subject was seated. It was painted in a St Petersburg military hospital where the alcoholic composer was ‘drying out’. The 1881 portrait of Modest Mussorgsky by Ilya Repin depicts him as unkempt, tousle-haired, bleary-eyed and red-nosed.

Double sided picture frame archival