Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 08/31/2011, uploaded on 03/06/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

I.      Promenade

II.      Tuileries: Children Quarreling at Play      

III.      Promenade

IV.      Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks

V.      The Market at Limoges

VI. The Great Gate of Kiev

Modest Mussorgsky composed his Pictures at an Exhibition in the first three weeks of June 1874 to perpetuate the memory of a dear friend, Victor Hartmann, an architect who died suddenly at the age of 39.  Mussorgsky was devastated. A year after Hartmann’s death a memorial exhibition of the artist's drawings, paintings, and designs was organized by Vladimir Stassov, a noted critic and the journalistic champion of the Russian arts movement. Mussorgsky attended this exhibition and was inspired and moved by what he saw. The result was a piano piece – now often heard in Ravel’s orchestral version – that sought to invoke inspiration from ten of the pictures Mussorgsky saw there. Due to time restrictions, there are only four “pictures” and two promenades on today’s program. The three humorous and grotesque “pictures” (Tuileries, Ballet, and Limoges) are followed by the final grandiose and ceremonial “The Great Gate of Kiev”.   Anastasia Seifetdinova

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.