Pictures at an Exhibition

- [Announcer] Major funding for this program is brought to you in part by Martin Messinger Symphony Orchestra Fund.

(bright piano music) (bright orchestral music) = Hello, I'm Gerard Schwarz, welcoming you to this production of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition".

Mussorgsky was a great Russian composer, lived in St. Petersburg.

He was introduced to the wonderful architect, painter, producer of sketches of Viktor Hartmann by the very famous critic Vladimir Stasov.

Stasov introduced these two gentlemen, and they became very dear and close friends.

Tragically, at the age of 39, Hartmann died.

Stasov off set up an exhibition of his architectural drawings, of his paintings, of his watercolors and his sketches in St. Petersburg, and Mussorgsky went to that exhibition and was just moved incredibly by the beauty and the elegance of the paintings, and especially of the drawings.

He went home and decided to write a piano work, around 10 movements, from pictures from that exhibition.

Interestingly, he included five promenades.

So you can just see Mussorgsky walking into the gallery, seeing the works, sometimes walking quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes contemplatively, and viewing these paintings.

He took 10 and made movements for those 10 of music and did five promenades.

This work was very successful as a piano work in the 20th century.

Unfortunately, Mussorgsky never heard it live, because he died before it was ever premiered.

But in 1921, the great conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Maurice Ravel, a wonderful French composer, to do an orchestration of "Pictures at an Exhibition".

It was a huge success from the moment it was played.

It was done at the Koussevitzky concerts in Paris.

Koussevitzky had a series of new music concerts that he would do in 1922.

And from that, this work has become one of the staples of the symphonic repertoire.

What I thought we would begin with today is an analysis, a small analysis, of what Ravel did to the Mussorgsky original.

And I'm very pleased to introduce you to Tingting Wu, a phenomenal pianist, who's getting her Doctor of Musical Arts here at the Frost School of Music, who will play all the piano parts, and then we can juxtapose that with the Ravel orchestration.

So, as I promised, it begins with a promenade.

You can just imagine Mussorgsky walking into this gallery to see the works of Hartmann.

(bright piano music) Now, the great opportunity we have today is we can imagine, what would you do?

What instruments should play that?

Well, I would do what Ravel did.

He gave it to a trumpet.

And then the whole brass choir comes in and plays.

(grand brass music) Then the first main movement is called "Gnomes", and it depicts a kind of grotesque nutcracker.

So let's hear how first Mussorgsky depicts that nutcracker, and then let's see what Revel does to it.

(frenetic piano music) (frenetic orchestral music) (frenetic piano music) The next movement is "The Old Castle".

It's an old castle, a medieval castle, with a troubadour, who was a medieval singer, singing in front of the castle with his guitar.

(solemn piano music) Interesting thing about this movement in the Ravel version is that it begins with the bassoons kind of introducing the troubadour's song, and then the song is played by an alto saxophone.

Now, the saxophone is not a normal instrument in the orchestra, very rarely used.

It was invented in the 1840s by Adolphe Sax, who was a Belgian instrument maker.

So the piece begins in the low register with the bassoons carrying the material, and then, as you hear the melody, it will be played in the Ravel version by the saxophone.

(solemn orchestral music) The next movement is "Tuileries".

Tuileries is a garden in Paris, a very famous garden, and the painting of Hartmann depicts two children at play in the Tuileries gardens.

(playful piano music) (playful orchestral music) The next movement is called "Bydlo".

Bydlo is the polish word for cattle, and this is big, huge cart with big wheels made out of wood, and the cart is in the distance, and you can see the lumbering ox coming up with this, and then it appears, and then it goes away in the Ravel version.

In the Mussorgsky version, it starts very full-bodied.

(emphatic piano music) Now, what instrument would be an ox, do you figure?

Well, Ravel made it a tuba.

Very interesting, because tuba don't usually get big solos like this, and this is an extraordinary moment in the orchestration.

Ravel is one of the great orchestrators of all time, and he uses incredible imagination.

So let's hear the beginning of the "Bydlo" movement.

(low orchestral music) The next movement is a ballet of unhatched chicks in their shells.

This was a design that Hartmann had done for a children's ballet.

So if it's unhatched chicks, you gotta figure it's gonna be a fast movement and it's gonna be a light movement.

So let's hear the Mussorgsky original first.

(rapid piano music) (rapid orchestral music) The next movement is Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle.

This was a sketch that Hartmann did two versions of.

One, in fact, was in Mussorgsky's personal collection.

It was done outside the Warsaw ghetto, and it depicts two gentlemen having a discussion, could be an argument.

One is pompous and rich, and you can hear in in the opening his voice.

(sharp piano music) And one who was poor and kind of had a snivelly voice.

(light piano music) In the Ravel version, the rich guy is the string section, and the poor guy is a trumpet with a mute kind of in a very peculiar way.

(emphatic orchestral music) (sharp trumpet music) Next we have "The Market in Limoges," which we won't show you.

It's pretty easy and clear to understand.

The next movement is really interesting.

Hartmann and Mussorgsky bring us back to Paris, but this time to the catacombs.

It's the underground burial place in Paris.

So you can imagine how eerie and dark that must sound.

And so Mussorgsky writes these ominous chords.

(ominous piano music) Ravel gives it to the trombones and the low horns to get that intensity of drama from those Parisian catacombs.

(ominous brass music) The next promenade is not what you would expect.

But after the catacombs, what kind of promenade should it be?

Mussorgsky had a subtitle for this promenade: "With the Dead in a Dead Language."

So in essence, it's very reflective.

It's not an aggressive walk.

It's a very eerie walk.

(eerie piano music) Ravel writes it first for the tremolo and the violins and then for the woodwinds playing the promenade melody.

(eerie orchestral music) The next movement is called "The Hut on Fowl's Legs."

It's actually a very famous Russian folk tale of Baba Yaga, who was a witch.

And Baba lived in this hut with skulls and all kinds of weird things around.

And there were legs at the bottom of the hut, and Baga Yaga would walk through the forest, doing whatever witches do in the forest.

(intense piano music) (intense orchestral music) And from this we go directly to the final movement, "The Great Gate of Kiev."

Hartmann had a vision for a great gate to the entrance of this wonderful city.

He had an architectural design for a huge great gate to be the entrance for Kyiv.

Unfortunately, they never built it, but it was a magnificent gate nonetheless.

And it is one of the most exquisite, majestic movements of this work.

And as you can imagine when you use a word majestic and powerful, you think of the brass section of the orchestra.

So first, let's hear Tingting Wu play the piano version, and then we'll hear a little bit of the Ravel orchestration.

(majestic piano music) (majestic orchestral music) Thank you so much Tingting for your wonderful playing.

It's a joy to hear you, I must say.

You do it so beautifully.

So now, we're gonna go to talk to Jill Deupi, who was the curator for this project, here at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami.

- I got a very excited call from Shelly Berg, who's of course the wonderful Dean of our Frost School of Music here at the university.

And Shelly had this great idea, and I think I probably said yes even before I knew what the idea really was.

But as he continued to describe the thought that he had, which actually came from the wonderful maestro Jerry Schwarz at the Frost to put on a performance of "Pictures at an Exhibition," which is of course the great piece written by Mussorgsky in the late 19th century, which I had heard of and I had heard but really hadn't paid too much attention to.

- As soon as Jill came in, we started to collaborate and talk about projects, and meet.

The piece is so well known, it doesn't provide surprises to the audience in the way if you were coming to the piece for the first time.

So the visual art provided that sense of surprise.

And so to do that with contemporary art, as well as some older art, I think was a great part of what we were doing.

And to do that, we were gonna have to access great art with a really great curator.

And fortunately, we have that on the campus of the University of Miami, and Jill Deupi is a wonderful curator and knows the collection, and she really came in and just gave such a lift to this project.

- Curators, art curators, have a unique role in the art world and in the museum context.

This is how I express my own creativity, crafting and creating shows.

And this was an extension of that same creative impulse that I had to share a vision, to select works of art that I thought really responded to the music as it was being played, the different movements, of course, also helping to evoke a mood.

What we didn't want, Jerry and I agreed on this early on, was to be literal.

We know that some of the works done by Viktor Hartmann exist, but we didn't wanna have that one-to-one correlation.

We wanted it to be different and special and really tap into the energy that is Art Basel and the energy that is Miami.

(impressive trumpet music) The promenade.

Wow.

The artists that we selected, their works really felt just right.

So look at, for example, the work of Virgil Ortiz, which was inspired by the Pueblo revolts of 1680.

And Karen LaMonte, she's a glass artist.

And you can see in that work the idea of absence and presence, the void, and the physicality.

Because when you think about what "Pictures at an Exhibition" is, it's really a memorial celebration of Victor Hartman's life by one of his closest friends.

And Omar Ba, too.

He is Senegalese by birth.

And you see these incredibly wonderful hybrid creatures.

His supermen, as they are, with the business suit and the ram's head, with nature engulfing the figure.

Very powerful, and it was the perfect fit for the promenade.

(playful woodwind music) If you've ever been to Paris, I'm sure you've walked through the Tuileries gardens.

It's a must-see.

And if you were there, I'm quite certain, I'm willing to bet, that you would have seen a gaggle or several of children doing what children do best, having fun out in the open air, making up their own games, kicking a ball, throwing a stick.

So it's this very uplifting energy both in the movement and in the park itself, and that's that same, that is the same energy, I think, that we see in this work, which was a commissioned piece executed by the wonderful Claudia DeMonte.

- The Tuileries Gardens spoke to me.

For some reason it just spoke to me, and I could see my colors and playfulness of my work in that.

I think it was Oscar Wilde that said "When good Americans die, they go to Paris."

And it just brought me there.

I just felt like I needed to be there.

The best parts of life, being in a garden in a beautiful place in a beautiful city.

And so you see this thing, and it's bright and happy, and I just think that making things that are happy is not a bad thing.

Matisse, who we all live in honor of, wasn't afraid to use bright colors.

He chose to paint the world an enticing, happy world that you wanted to be part of.

- Yes, absolutely.

The twinkling, sparkling movement is so beautifully, so deftly captured by her in this work.

But I think there's much more, there are many more dimensions to us.

Howard Cook was an illustrator in the early part of the 20th century, and I think that his work is a little less nuanced, if I may say.

So here you really do see the purity of joy, the joyousness of riding on a merry-go-round as a child and feeling that sense of the wind whipping through your hair.

And I personally, I can feel the air racing by me as I look at this work.

I'm transported right back to that merry-go-round of my childhood.

(low tuba music) Bydlo was a really fun movement to work on, because from the outset, you know exactly what is happening.

You can hear and see and feel these beast of burdens laboring through the field.

And so this one was actually, I would say, easier than some of the other movements for me to think about and then decide upon the works that we should use for this particular sequence.

In the end we chose three works of art, all quite different, one from the next.

We chose a painting by the Cuban artist Carlos Quintana, who has this very painterly approach to art making, and his work is very visceral.

In each stroke, in each of his movements of the brush, you feel the emotion of this mysterious person riding backwards on a bull, looking over his shoulder.

It raises all sorts of interesting questions.

We also chose a work on paper by Julian Trevelyan, who was a British artist and printmaker.

What an unusual topic to pick to memorialize in his work.

And the colors are so saturated, almost acidic, and the cropping and the angle is so contemporary.

And then we also chose a first century BCE Bengal fragment from our historic collection.

In each case, you know exactly what you're looking at, but what I really appreciate is the way the artists have approached the idea of the bull using their own language, including, of course the ancient fragment, which reminds us that nothing is new, that humanity has been creating for a very long time indeed.

(lively orchestral music) "Marketplace" takes us back to the heart of the action.

So, before we were the gardens, now we're in the marketplace.

And you can, in the music, just hear the voices, the back and forth coming from the different stalls, the people catching up on the town gossip.

I love it.

And so I hope that you can get that same sensibility in the works that we chose, including this incredible work by Gladys Nilsson.

This is quite typical of her work, this surfeit of activity, of overlapping forms, of human collage, the hustle and bustle.

And again, I think it's this wonderful bundle of energy that really speaks to the music.

We get that same sense in the Abraham Walkowitz work, from a different period, earlier, and certainly more restrained.

But here you can hear the voices, or at least I can, of the women in their market stalls.

And then we have this beautiful painting of fragmented planes of colors by Giuseppe Ajmone.

And perhaps not a household name, but again, this speaks to our interest of surfacing new artists and putting into the spotlight as well as, again, as we saw with some other works, the desire to not be literal, to invite listeners to accompany us to a space that was a little bit more about emotion and mood, which is communicated through a non-figurative gesture like we see here.

(intense orchestral music) "Hut on Chicken's Legs."

What does that even mean?

Well, what it means is it's, of course, a reference to a folk tale, the stuff to give small children, and maybe even adults, nightmares.

So this one was really fun as well, and it was nice to be able to work with another living artist, Ed McGowin.

- Well, this is Baba Yaga, the witch, the deformed, horrible mean, psychotic person that was dragging off an infant in the woods to the hut, and the hut is built on chicken feet.

I decided to make the hut transparent and put the figures in the transparent hut.

- Ed created this wonderful evocation of Baba Yaga.

In a very different vein, but also evocative of the mood of the movement, was the great Goya's etching here.

Talbot is the father of positive-negative photography, and I'm quite sure that he wasn't trying to tell a story in this work, or at least not the story of Baba Yaga, but I feel that, if you were to venture inside, you just might find someone perhaps not on chicken legs but someone who was equally terrifying.

(majestic orchestral music) (grand trumpet music) (grand orchestral music) (frenetic orchestral music) (ominous orchestral music) (frenetic orchestral music) (light orchestral music) (solemn orchestral music) (grand orchestral music) (playful orchestral music) (low orchestral music) (bright orchestral music) (dramatic orchestral music) (light orchestral music) (rapid orchestral music) (impressive orchestral music) (sharp trumpet music) (impressive orchestral music) (lively orchestral music) (frenetic orchestral music) (ominous orchestral music) (delicate string music) (delicate orchestral music) (intense orchestral music) (eerie orchestral music) (intense orchestral music) (majestic orchestral music) (gentle orchestral music) (spirited orchestral music) (gentle orchestral music) (solemn orchestral music) (majestic orchestral music) (ecstatic orchestral music) (building orchestral music) (ecstatic orchestral music) (solemn orchestral music) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program is brought to you in part by Martin Messinger Symphony Orchestra Fund.