Soloist: Janine Jansen (violin)
The Mariinsky Orchestra
Conductor: Valery Gergiev
PROGRAMME:
Modest Musorgsky
Night on Bald Mountain, fantasia for symphony orchestra (original version)
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Violin Concerto in D Major
Modest Musorgsky
Pictures at an Exhibition (orchestrated by Maurice Ravel)
Modest Musorgsky completed the score for Night on Bald Mountain with incredible speed. The composer’s letters reveal that Night was composed in just some ten days (12 to 23 June 1867), “a clean and finished result, without drafts”. The idea of this programme symphony tableau had come to the composer ten years earlier, though it only came to fruition after hearing Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique, performed in Paris in 1866.
The composer gave a brief description of the programme on the title page of the score: “1. Assembly of the witches, their talk and gossip; 2. Satan’s journey; 3. Obscene praises of Satan; and 4. Sabbath.” Musorgsky dedicated the piece to Balakirev, though the leader of the Mighty Five refused to perform Night on Bald Mountain at a concert, demanding that the composer “bring the music into order.” In response, Musorgsky replied firmly and unyieldingly: “Whether or not you agree, my friend, to perform my witches, whether I am to hear them or not, I will not change anything at all in general terms or the development, both of which are closely connected with the content of the tableau…” In the event, Musorgsky was not to hear “his witches”; on two occasions he used material from this work – in the Mighty Five’s collective opera-ballet Mlada and his own final opera Sorochintsy Fair. It was only after the composer’s death that Night on Bald Mountain was performed in a free (loose!) adaptation by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and went on to win international renown. For many years, Musorgsky’s original score lay neglected; it was only in 1968 that it was performed in Moscow.
At a concert on 18 March 1989 at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad as part of an anniversary festival to mark one and a half centuries since Musorgsky’s birth (and, prior to that, in Amsterdam) Valery Gergiev conducted, in one programme, the first ever Russian performance of both editions of the work – Musorgsky’s original score together with its “sanitised” adaption. Audiences familiar with Rimsky-Korsakov’s frequently-performed version, praised for its perfection of form, paid due tribute to Musorgsky’s original symphonic tableau, with its natural power that bursts forth from the framework of generally accepted canons.
Iosif Raiskin
Pictures at an Exhibition is a piano cycle that Musorgsky composed in June 1874. This was a time of renewed artistic energy: to great acclaim the Mariinsky Theatre had staged the premiere of Boris Godunov, the song cycle Sunless had been composed and work was continuing apace on Khovanshchina. “Sounds and ideas have frozen in the air, I swallow them, sate myself, I can hardly succeed in scrawling them on paper... Work is going so well,” the composer wrote to Vladimir Stasov. The cycle is dedicated to the memory of the talented architect and artist Viktor Hartmann (1834–1873) and was composed following a visit to an exhibition organised by Stasov in February 1874. The idea of the work (indicated by the composer as A Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann) and the unprecedented title bear witness to the unique nature of Pictures at an Exhibition, confirmed in the music of the cycle itself – unusually vivid, deep and giving birth to numerous ideas and their interpretations, both for performers and researchers.
The orchestrations of the cycle – currently around twenty – are interpretations of it. The most famous came from Ravel (1922). Ravel took great care with Musorgsky’s music (he published only one version of the music of the first piece, Promenade). At the same time, he freely interpreted several images: the final part of the Pictures is Bydlo (the drawing depicted a large cart drawn by bulls; with Musorgsky a different image emerged – that of a heavy fate) and was transformed into a funeral procession to a drumbeat; there are also such vivid effects as the squawking and squeaking of chicks in The Ballet of the Un-hatched Chicks (after sketches for Yuli Gerber’s ballet Trilby).
Musorgsky’s Pictures are by no means musical illustrations of the exhibits at the memorial display. The idea itself, however, is a kind of journey through different countries and ages, recorded in drawings and watercolours, designs for buildings and other structures, sketches for theatre costumes and sets and the world of imagery they conjure up, and was seized on by the composer. In the manuscript of Catacombae. Sepulcrum romanum (the drawing that depicts this piece shows the artist himself), Musorgsky added a codicil about “the creative spirit of the late Hartmann” that drew him after him. To an even greater extent, the composer himself acts as a guide in the cycle by means of the music of the Promenade that flows throughout the work (it makes itself felt in the individual “pictures”). There is one further analogy to be made: Musorgsky appears as the narrator of a series of stories that draw the listener “deep” into each “picture”, bringing them to life through the artist and the musician’s imagination. We are faced with a chain of fantastical (Gnomus, Catacombae, The House on Chicken Legs. Baba Yaga) and utterly realistic images, scenes and even micro-novellas (Il vecchio Castello, Bydlo, The Ballet of the Un-hatched Chicks, Tuileries. Dispute d’enfants après jeux, Samuel Goldenberg et Schmuÿle [the composer combined two drawings, one of a rich and one of a poor Jew], Limoges. Le Marché. La Grande Nouvelle). The culmination of the cycle is the final The Bogatyr Gates. In the Capital City of Kiev which unifies the past, the present and the future like an inspired anthem for Russia.
Vladimir Goryachikh
Pyotr Tchaikovsky wrote his only Violin Concerto in 1878 when he was already an acclaimed composer having written his First Piano Concerto, four symphonies and operas (including Eugene Onegin). The Violin Concerto somewhat repeated the destiny of the First Piano Concerto as it was not immediately judged as it deserved to be. Today it is difficult to imagine that a work of such power, expressiveness and beauty did not immediately find an appreciative audience or performer. Initially Tchaikovsky had decided to write the Concerto for his friend and pupil Iosif Kotek, and then because of subsequent disagreements he offered it to the renowned violinist and teacher Leopold Auer. On seeing, however, that the latter “shelved” his work he dedicated the piece to Adolph Brodsky who was the first performer of the Concerto in Russia and abroad and who met with strong resistance from other musicians and sharply negative critical comments afterwards.
For one and a half centuries the main difficulty for the performer has been the extremely virtuoso nature of the Concerto. Today the main problem lies rather in the interpretation because offering a new treatment of such a famous and frequently performed work is a task that is definitely not for the fainthearted.
Svetlana Nikitina
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