Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Night on Bald Mountain; Khovanshchina; Borodin: in the Steppes of Central Asia.(Sound Recording Review)

Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Night on Bald Mountain; Khovanshchina; Borodin: In the Steppes of Central Asia. Leonard Slatkin, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Mobile Fidelity UDSACD 4004.

As you know, Mussorgsky wrote his Pictures at an Exhibition in 1874 as a collection piano pieces, each short work describing a different painting or drawing by the composer's friend, Viktor Hartmann. Mussorgsky's idea was to create a series of tone poems as a tribute to the artist by depicting impressions of ten of Hartmann's paintings hanging in a gallery and being viewed by passersby. Mussorgsky's results were not entirely impressed upon the public, however, until they were orchestrated by Maurice Ravel many years later in the form we know them here.

Leonard Slatkin and his St. Louis players undertook to bring these oft-recorded works to disc in 1975, but I wish he had taken more time to recreate the color and character of each portrait. As it is, he seems to spend more time replicating the beauty of the music than interpreting the individual peculiarities of the paintings. The various "Promenades," for instance, seem hurried, as though the visitors to the gallery were rushing to find an exit; the "Ballet of the Chicks" doesn't seem too much different from the "Children Quarreling at Play"; the "Hut on Fowl's Legs" doesn't have much energy; and "The Great Gate of Kiev" lacks necessary grandeur. For a definitive rendering, compare Fritz Reiner (RCA/JVC) and his Chicago Orchestra, where ...