Ravinia 2019, Issue 6, Week 11

MODEST MUSSORGSKY (1839–81) Pictures at an Exhibition (Orchestrated by Maurice Ravel) Scored for three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, alto saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani , glockenspiel, chimes, triangle, tam-tam, rattle, whip, cymbal, snare drum, bass drum, xylophone, celesta, harp, and strings Modest Mussorgsky is often associated with the group of late-19th-century composers known as “The Mighty Handful”—including Mily Balaki- rev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov—dedicated to the creation of a Russian musical style independent of West- ern influences. (Critic Vladimir Stassov coined the epithet in 1867.) This group operated with greatest cohesion during the 1860s, although its aesthetic legacy extended through several gener- ations of Russian composers. Mussorgsky emerged as the radical individualist among The Mighty Handful. For a brief period, he resided in a commune whose members be- lieved that art should reflect life, an early type of “artistic Realism.” His close circle of artistic friends, all of whom invested social and polit- ical commentary in representations of com- mon or folk life, included the Nihilist author Nikolai Chernyshevsky and a promising young architect, Victor Hartman. Mussorgsky later reaffirmed his Realist conviction in a brief au- tobiography, stating that “art is a means of com- municating with people, not an aim in itself.” On July 23, 1873, Victor Hartman died prema- turely at the age of 39. Stassov considered the loss a national tragedy: “In my eyes he was the most talented, the most original, the most ad- venturous, the boldest of all our architects, even those of the new young school.” To honor his departed colleague, Stassov organized an exhibi- tion of 400 sketches and paintings highlighting Hartman’s quirky blend of common objects, folk art, and architecture. After visiting the exhibi- tion, Mussorgsky drafted an “album series” (a collection of character pieces) for solo piano in- spired by Hartman’s designs. He dedicated these Pictures at an Exhibition , composed between June 2 and 22, 1874, to Stassov. The Promenade , heard initially and throughout the piece, represents the composer “as he strolled through the exhibition, joyfully or sadly recall- ing the talented deceased artist,” according to Stassov. Polyglot titles for the 10 main selections give evidence of Mussorgsky’s extraordinary linguistic skills as well as the diverse sources of fairy tales and scenes of ordinary life—borrowed from French, Italian, Yiddish, Polish, ancient Roman, and Russian cultures—that inspired Hartman’s idiosyncratic creations. These vivid musical characterizations, folkish melodies, and quasi-symphonic textures have inspired large- scale instrumental transcriptions by Mikhail Tuchmalov, Henry Wood, Leo Funtek, Maurice Ravel (the most familiar, from 1922), Lucien Cailliet, Leopold Stokowski, Walter Goehr, Ser- gei Gorchakov, Lawrence Leonard, Elgar How- arth, and Vladimir Ashkenazy, among others. Hartman designed Gnomus , a nutcracker in the shape of a grotesque dwarf, for the Artists’ Club (1869). A guitar-strumming troubadour sings before an ancient Italian castle in Il vecchio cas- tello . In Tuileries , a nurse attends to quarreling children in the famous Parisian garden. None of Hartman’s known paintings corresponds to Bydlo , a bulky Polish peasant’s cart pulled by Sandomir cattle. The Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells arose from costumes designed for Marius Petipa’s ballet Trilbi , in which some children ap- peared as newborn canary chicks while others remain encased in their shells. Samuel Golden- berg and Schmuyl e presumably represented rich and poor Jews, such as Hartman encountered during an 1868 visit to the town of Sandomir in southeastern Poland. (Hartman’s wife was Jew- ish.) Women gossip about a missing cow and new dentures in The Market Place at Limoges . Mussorgsky carefully chose a Latin title for his illustration of a Parisian catacomb: “Latin text would be fine; the creative genius of the late Hartman leads me to the skulls and invokes them; the skulls begin to glow.” The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba-Yaga) drew on the fearful legend of the Russian witch Baba-Yaga, who crushes the bones of unwary children in her flying mortar. The artist/architect transformed Baba-Yaga into a clock standing on chicken legs. Hartman en- tered his watercolor design for a great gate at the city limits of Kiev with three massive arches and pointed cupola in an architectural competition following the unsuccessful Nihilist assassination attempt on the tsar in 1866. –Program notes © 2019 Todd E. Sullivan KRZYSZTOF URBAŃSKI, conductor Graduating from the Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw in 2007, Krzysztof Urbański was the first-prize winner of the Prague Spring Interna- tional Conducting Competition the same year. He immediately began serving as assistant con- ductor of the Warsaw Philharmonic, holding the position until 2009. Urbański then became chief conductor and artistic leader of the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra from 2010 to 2017, with highlights of his tenure including his first for- ay into opera with a fully staged presentation of Bizet’s Carmen , as well as two European tours and performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring , Brahms’s German Requiem , and Mahler’s Sym- phony No. 1, among many other masterworks. This fall he will be entering his ninth season as music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, a position he will depart at the end of the following season. Together the Trondheim and Indianapolis orchestra co-commissioned Wojciech Kilar for the piece Pastorale e capric- cio , which Urbański premiered in 2013. Urbańs- ki held the position of principal guest conduc- tor of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra during 2012–16, and in 2015 he took the same position with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, with which he has recently toured Japan and Europe in addition to recording works by Lutosławski, Dvořák, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich for Alpha Classics. His discography also includes works by Chopin with pianist Jan Lisiecki and the NDR Elbphilharmonie as well as Martinů’s First Cello Concerto with Sol Gabetta and the Berlin Phil- harmonic. In recent seasons he has made guest appearances with numerous ensembles, includ- ing the Los Angeles, Munich, New York, Oslo, and Rotterdam Philharmonics; Gewandhaus, Paris, Philharmonia, and Tonhalle Orchestras; San Francisco Symphony; Netherlands and French Radio Philharmonic Orchestras; Dres- den State Orchestra; and Chicago, London, (US) National, Toronto, and Vienna Symphony Orchestras. In 2015, Urbański became the first conductor ever to receive the Leonard Bernstein Award from the Schleswig-Holstein Festival. Krzysztof Urbański made his joint Ravinia and Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut in 2014 and is making his second return to the festival. Modest Mussorgsky RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 12 – AUGUST 18, 2019 100