Pictures at an Exhibition

Pictures at an Exhibition is a series of vivid images in sound, a musical tribute to the artist who inspired them. Viktor Hartmann was an architect and painter, and a close friend of the composer Modest Mussorgsky. When Hartmann died suddenly in 1873, aged just 39, a commemorative exhibition was staged in St. Petersburg. Mussorgsky visited the exhibition and was inspired to create a work in Hartmann’s memory. Pictures at an Exhibition was written for solo piano in 1874. It is best known today through the orchestrated 1922 version by Maurice Ravel, although many other arrangements have also been made. Mussorgsky frames his pictures with short “Promenade” movements, representing the visitor strolling from one painting to the next. Several of the movements are dark and gloomy, especially “The Old Castle” (which has an eerie saxophone solo in Ravel’s version) and “Catacombs”. Light relief comes with “Tuileries”, which depicts a playful children’s quarrel; “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks”; and the bustling “Marketplace at Limoges”. We also meet fairytale characters in “Gnomus” and “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs”, the latter a sinister scherzo invoking the witch Baba Yaga. Mussorgsky builds to a powerful conclusion with “The Great Gate of Kyiv”. Hartmann had designed a ceremonial gate for the city, and Mussorgsky imagines a grand procession passing through, to the sound of bells from within the gate’s imposing tower.