Bilder einer Ausstellung

Sonorous portraits in sound: An exhibition in memory of his late friend, the painter Victor Hartmann, inspired Mussorgsky to create his piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition. In five Promenades he guides the listener from one picture to the next, from the grotesquely disjointed “Gnomus” to a featherweight ballet of unhatched chicks, an afternoon in the Tuileries, the sinister witch’s hut on fowl’s legs and the majestic tones of the Great Gate of Kiev. Orchestral arrangements have made the work world-famous: the world of Mussorgsky’s fertile imagination is depicted in all its scintillating colours and is transmuted into an intense listening experience.