[Brilliant Classics]
Kategoria: Nagrania muzyczneWysyłka: od ręki
Hartmann, who had died the previous year. Mussorgsky
portrayed some of Hartmann's pictures in music when they
were displayed at an exhibition in Saint Petersburg. The
cycle...
Pełen opis produktu 'Mussorgsky: Pictures At An Exhibition Orchestral & Solo Piano' »
The drunken sot who glares out at us from Ilya Repin?s celebrated
portrait looks more like a tramp than a composer, and Mussorgsky?s
music has a similarly uncompromising expressive power, music that
seems to work despite rather thanbecause of itself. Pianists have
wrestled with the unpianistic corners of his most famous work since
he composed it in 1874 in memory of his friend, the painter Viktor
Hartmann, who had died the previous year. Mussorgsky portrayed some
of Hartmann's pictures in music when they were displayed at an
exhibition in Saint Petersburg. The cycle of ten individual
paintings is linked by the famous ?promenade?, symbolizing the
viewer of the pictures wandering through the exhibition. Hartmann?s
bold and puzzling vignettes find their perfect analogue in
Mussorgsky?s pianistic reimagining, but fellow composers could
hardly leave the orchestral potential of thisoften-awkward music
alone. Ravel wasn?t the first to mix his orchestral palette with
Mussorgsky?s colours, but his version has justly stood the test of
time, and stands alone for its sensitivity to the pungent,
folkloristic flavour of the original. Here is a rare and useful
opportunity to compare the two versions side by side, completed by
more music by Mussorgsky both wellknown (Night on Bare Mountain)
and perhaps less familiar (assorted miniatures that make up the
rest of the composer?s slender output for piano). The composer and
conductor Igor Markevitch was a celebrated interpreter of Pictures,
and this is his third recording.Mussorgsky?s ?Pictures at an
Exhibition? is one of the most famous and most frequently performed
romantic piano cycles of the entire repertoire. It contains
colourful, highly original and gripping musical depictions of a
series of painting by Mussorgsky?s friend Hartmann: the menacing
and evil Gnomus, the mysterious Old Castle, the frolicsome chicks
just out of the egg, quarrelling children, the busy marketplace
full of chattering women, and then moving into more sinister
regions of the Catacomb (?with the Dead in the language of the
Dead?), the brutal force and terrorof the witch Baba Yaga,
culminating in the glorious Great Gate of Kiev. This work is so
rich and ?picturesque? , that it is hard to resist to make an
orchestral arrangement of it, and several composers wrote their own
orchestration, the most famous that by Maurice Ravel (a master
orchestrator). Nevertheless the piano score leaves ample
opportunity totrigger the creativity of the pianist, and the
interpretation by Russian pianist Alexander Warenberg is one of
great imagination and authority. ? This release offers both the
original piano version and the Ravel orchestration, filled up with
the orchestral ?A Night on Bare Mountain? and the more modest, but
no less impressive piano cycle by Tchaikovsky: The Seasons.Other
information:?Markevitch has succeeded in bringing out the purely
Russian nature of the score while most of the otherconductors seem
to be unduly influenced by Ravel?s orchestration? (Gramophone).
