Meet the Phil 2006/07 |
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 SESSION A: Thursday 2 November 2006 11.30am-1pm, Studio 7
Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky
Promenade
Gnomus Promenade
Il Vecchio Castello Promenade
Tuileries Bydlo Promenade
Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle Limoges Market Place - Catacombae (Sepulchrum Romanum) - Cum mortuis in lingua morta The Hut on Hens' Legs - The Great Gate of Kiev
Victor Alexandrovich Hartmann was a leading architect in the St. Petersburg of the early 1870s, and a close friend of Mussorgsky and of the critic Stasov (whose father had been an architect, and whose writings were by no means exclusively about music). When Hartmann died suddenly in 1874, at the age of thirty-nine, Mussorgsky was overcome by grief; Stasov, ever the propagandist for Russian art, arranged an exhibition of Hartmann's designs, watercolours and drawings. It was an immediate response to this exhibition that Mussorgsky wrote his famous suite of Pictures for piano, one of the few major projects in his chaotic, creative life which he brought to a definitive conclusion.
For all its highly effective, if unorthodox, pianism, Mussorgsky's suite has moments which seem to cry out for the greater weight and variety of colour of an orchestra for their full realisation. Surprisingly, although that master-orchestrator Rimsky-Korsakov supervised the posthumous publication of the piece, he seems never to have considered an orchestral version himself; but many others have attempted the task. Modern Proms audiences might be interested to hear the scoring by Sir Henry Wood, which no less an authority on orchestral technique than the late Gordon Jacob considered 'superior to Ravel's in picturesqueness and vividness'. But it is the transcription by Ravel, made in 1922 for the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, which has become by far the most popular orchestral version of the Pictures. In it, Ravel thickened his usually needle-fine brushstrokes, so that, as Roger Nichols has written 'much of the sound has a roughness and solidity that we find nowhere else in Ravel's output'. This reflects both Ravel's musical response to Mussorgsky's sometimes rough-hewn piano writing and more generally the French fascination of the time - exemplified in the public enthusiasm for Dyagilev's Ballets Russes seasons - with what was perceived as the 'primitive' element in Russian art.
There is certainly a Russian flavour in the Promenade which opens the suite, with its pentatonic melody in a mixture of 5/4 and 6/4 time. This depicts a visitor, identifiable with the composer himself, walking around between the exhibits and it recurs several times within the work (once fewer in Ravel than in Mussorgsky) in different versions. Its sonorous initial statement leads to Gnomus. Hartmann's picture was apparently a design for a wooden nutcracker with its jaws painted to resemble a grotesque face; but, not for the only time in the suite, Mussorgsky was stimulated less by the design than by what had inspired it, and his music depicts the jerky movements of a deformed dwarf with alarming verisimilitude.
A quieter version of the Promenade leads to Il Vecchio Castello, inspired by a painting of a medieval Italian castle, with a minstrel singing in the foreground. Ravel gives the minstrel's plaintively modal melody, improbably but most effectively, to an alto saxophone.
The third Promenade is strident, but very short as if the viewer is becoming more engrossed in the pictures and paying less attention to his surroundings. It is followed by Tuileries, a picture of chattering children at play in the famous Paris gardens, and then by Bydlo, a picture of a lumbering Polish ox-cart. Music imparts a necessary sense of movement in both these scenes, especially in Bydlo, which is constructed as what used to be called a 'patrol': the cart approaches slowly from the distance, passes close by and then disappears into the distance again. The melody - perhaps the cart-driver's song - is assigned by Ravel at the beginning and end to the tuba.
One last reflective Promenade leads to the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, a little dance scene suggested by Hartmann's costume designs for a ballet called Trilby (nothing to do with Gerald Du Maurier's novel of twenty years later). Next is Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle , inspired by a double portrait (which Mussorgsky owned) of two Jews, one rich and one poor, from the Warsaw Ghetto. There is no caricature here: Hartmann seems to have treated his subjects as studies in facial types, and Mussorgsky matches this with hints of Jewish musical inflections and in the middle section, of the characteristic speech patterns of a whining beggar; Ravel's scoring for a solo muted trumpet perhaps makes his plaintive appeal a little larger than life. There are suggestions of speech patterns too, in the depiction of gossiping, quarrelling old women in Limoges Market Place .
Suddenly, without a break, the music plunges into Catacombae , based on a Hartmann painting of himself exploring the ancient catacombs of Paris with a lantern. Ravel keeps the strings, apart from the doubles basses, out of this slow moving, dark Largo; but he reintroduces them, with violins and violas in eerie tremolandos, in the succeeding Cum mortuis in lingua morta ('With the dead in a dead language'). Here Mussorgsky wrote on his manuscript score 'Hartmann's creative spirit leads me to the place of skulls and calls to them - the skulls begin to glow softly from within'. And indeed he represents himself no longer as an observer but as part of the scene with the Promenade theme in the bass.
The last two movements, played without a break, are on specifically Russian subjects. The Hut on Hens' Legs was a design by Hartmann for a clock based on the legendary home of the cruel Baba Yaga; but Mussorgsky forgets the clock in favour of Baba Yaga herself, with a wild witch's ride interrupted only briefly by a sinister central episode. The Great Gate of Kiev was not a picture of an actual structure, but an architectural sketch of a possible gate, surprisingly squat and bulbous in the oriental manner.
Mussorgsky's Great Gate however, sounds more massive and less ornamental than its pictorial equivalent, especially in Ravel's powerful orchestration. This finale incorporates episodes suggesting a religious procession approaching from the distance and passing through the gate and also includes the distinctively Russian sounds of tolling and pealing bells, on the way to its grandiose conclusion.
Programme Notes © Anthony Burton
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