Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition

Have you ever been to an art museum and wished that you had music
to accompany your experience?  Music that made the art you
were looking at more vivid, more immediate, and more emotionally
intense?  Well, Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an
Exhibition is the piece for you.  Inspired by his late
friend Victor Hartmann’s paintings and designs, Mussorgsky
composed a series of 10 miniature pieces for piano based on
Hartmann's works.  Unlike many other collections of
miniature pieces that have thematic or structural connections,
Pictures at An Exhibition doesn’t feature that at all, keeping
with Mussorgsky’s often rebellious ways as a composer.
 Instead, the music is connected by movements called
Promenades, as if Mussorgsky literally walks you to the next
painting at the exhibition. Mussorgsky’s remarkably imaginative
piece is justly famous and often played by pianists, but what is
perhaps the most fascinating thing about this piece is the
creativity that it has inspired in other composers. Pictures at
an Exhibition, or parts of it, has been arranged more than 50
times for any number of configurations of musicians. So today,
we’re going to explore each picture in detail, talking about what
Mussorgsky actually does to make these works of art come to life
in such a compelling way.  At the same time, we’re going to
compare the original piano piece to some of the arrangements,
focusing of course on the most famous of them all, the explosion
of color that is Maurice Ravel’s arrangement.  We’ll also
talk about Mussorgsky himself, his compositional reputation at
the time, and the brilliant creativity of this one of a kind
piece.