Denis Matsuev recital (piano)

The Seasons is a traditional subject for music, but where Vivaldi and Haydn produced picturesque visions of the four seasons themselves Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky dedicated twelve pieces for piano to the months of the year. The composer was commissioned to write them by Nikolai Matveyevich Bernard for Nouvellist magazine. The magazine consisted almost entirely of sheet music – works for piano and romances – and the Bernard family in St Petersburg published it for over half a century. Having just taken control of the magazine, the  thirty-three-year-old Nikolai Matveyevich resolved to give it a make-over. Tchaikovsky agreed to the publisher’s proposal and in 1876 each issue of the magazine opened with a new work (“character scene”) by him together with a poetic epigraph and graphic illustration chosen by Bernard. These three art forms sat very well together! This fruitful idea was soon adopted by the Danes, who in 1881 republished works by Tchaikovsky with specially written verse by Holger Drachmann and engravings by local artists. Tchaikovsky turned to typically romantic genres (a waltz, scherzo and barcarole) and left the publisher’s plans for “character scenes” far behind. The illustration that accompanied the piece in 1876 looks even more interesting today. It really is “scenes” in “the Russian style”. From them one can understand Bernard’s initial concept – to laud the poetry of rural life and the joys of simple folk. In the illustration for Autumn Song women are singing as they gather hops, two young peasants meet in White Nights and in the Barcarole an assembly glides along in a boat to the sounds of the balalaika.
Anna Bulycheva

In the summer of 1873, the talented Russian artist and architect Viktor Hartmann, a close friend of Musorgsky, died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-nine. On Vladimir Stasov’s initiative and with the support of the St Petersburg Society of Architects, in February and March 1874 the Imperial Academy of Arts hosted a posthumous exhibition that featured some four hundred of Hartmann’s works created over fifteen years – drawings, watercolours, architectural designs, sketches for theatre sets and costumes and sketches of objets d’art. And between 2 and 22 June 1874 Musorgsky composed his Pictures at an Exhibition piano cycle.
This is the story in brief behind the emergence of one of Russian music’s most surprising and mysterious works. In Pictures at an Exhibition, Musorgsky’s only full-scale and fully developed instrumental cycle, there is much that is unusual even for this composer: the abundance of contrasting, fairytale and fantastical images, the principle of providing names for the sections (using seven languages) and, lastly, the bright and triumphant finale and apotheosis, unparalleled in Musorgsky’s music.
Despite all its external diversity of colour, the series Pictures at an Exhibition has a precisely balanced structure and bears the features of an instrumental mystery where there is a Hell and a Heaven, a man with his passions, the path from death and darkness to the triumph of life and light. Hartmann’s drawings and sketches proved to be an impulse for Musorgsky to create “another” reality, it is as if the composer “enters” the picture itself as sometimes happens in fantasy films, the music brings the picture to life from the inside, and often what we hear is not at all what it appears to be.
Georgy Kovalevsky