Catalogue Connection: 25100

Divine Art Records move forward with their fine overview of Russian Piano Music , and now with Volume 8 they focus their attention on one of the most popular of all Russian composers, Modest Mussorgsky . The sound recordings took place in January 2011, and include one piece which receives its world première recording, and a handful of manuscript variants from Pictures at an Exhibition that see the light of day for the first time.

One would think that since Pictures at an Exhibition has always been favored in its orchestral garb, and that Russian pianists of legendary stature like Richter and Ashkenazy have already recorded the piano version for posterity, would be enough to deter any pianist from considering yet another recording of this masterpiece of imagination. But Anthony Goldstone is not just any pianist, and he still finds many new things to say within this old warhorse. The various Promenade episodes for example, are each given their proper emotional weight and color, and are devoid of the mechanical tendencies some pianists inflict on them. The Old Castle ‘s chant like melody is always very well phrased here. And as chickens peck the soil in a helter skelter fashion, with uneven and jerky movements, so is Goldstone’s rhythm in the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks . Both the Catacombs and the Cum mortuis in lingua mortua are full of flame cast shadows that shimmer along the dark corridors. Goldstone’s clever use of the sustain pedal creates the proper cavernous atmosphere. And of course, the closing Gates are given all the noble and stately demeanour they deserve.

One surprise for me on this disc is the piece titled Impromptu passioné . I never would have suspected that Mussorgsky could sound so much like Schubert at his melodic best. The earlier version of Gnomus contains a few bars of odd harmonic twists that were eventually revised, and the minor changes within The Hut and The Gates are enough to demonstrate how composers sometimes manipulate the same notes to obtain the desired effect. And the unfinished Nurse Shuts Me in a Dark Room (from Memories of Childhood) is here given its first recording in a completed version by Anthony Goldstone himself. It is an ambitious little piece that somehow very much resembles the efforts of a young Schumann.

Another fine addition to the Russian Piano Music series which, like its predecessors, does a good job of capturing the essence of the composer in one snapshot. It’s like receiving a picture postcard from Russia.

Having immersed myself in Mussorgsky’s vocal music, and produced an LP of The Nursery etc in original versions, I keenly awaited this, possibly the most important recording in Anthony Goldstone’s series, recorded as usual on his Grotrian piano at the Alkborough village church close by his Lincolnshire home there.

There are many recordings of Pictures from an Exhibition , which Richter considered to be “the most profound masterwork of Russian piano music”, but this one scores by being given in context with other pieces which relate to it. Goldstone plays from Mussorgsky’s own manuscript, including a few variants. There is no let-down; Goldstone is fully equal to this demanding score, and he supplies illuminating notes which, taken together, makes this release an essential purchase for Mussorgsky enthusiasts.

A worthy addition to an important series, strongly recommended even if you have several others, including the Ravel orchestration.

Given that Volume 4 in this series – featuring the magnificent Lyapunov Sonata – was one of my discs of the year for 2010, I was looking forward to listening to this disc hugely. I am pleased to report that in every respect it is up to the high standard of the earlier releases and matches them in the quality of the engineering, production, programming and above all the performance of pianist Anthony Goldstone. Goldstone has been the cornerstone of this – to date – eight volume series; this is his fifth disc. A cursory check on Goldstone’s discography reveals a remarkably diverse repertoire all of which he performs with remarkable sympathy and aplomb either as a solo performer or in tandem with his regular duet partner and wife Caroline Clemmow. The consistent quality of his music making is both a wonder and a delight but if pushed I would have to say that it is this series of Russian piano rarities that has given me the greatest personal pleasure.

You get the feeling that the production team here have the formula– in the best sense of the word – for these discs off to a tee. The recording location is the same as the earlier discs and if anything the sound here is even finer than those excellent recordings; a piano in superb condition evenly voiced across the entire keyboard, richly recorded with plenty of detail but set in a pleasing acoustic. I notice that there seems to be no producer or engineer credited and that the playing rights for the disc resides with Goldstone himself so I wonder if he supervised the technical as well as musical aspect of the performance? He certainly does provide – again as before – the superb liner note. He has a natural communicator’s ability to write in a manner that is fascinatingly informative and packed with interesting facts yet at the same time wears its academic credentials lightly. A case in point here is that the performing edition of the Pictures from an Exhibition is nothing less than the composer’s manuscript and the liner points out numerous deviations and alterations between this text and the standard published version.

With previous volumes nearly all the repertoire was unfamiliar. Here we get the very familiar Pictures which will have collectors contemplating the need for repertoire duplication. Given the quality of the performance, the fact that it uses the manuscript and includes rare variant movements and that this work represents less than half of the music on this very well-filled disc I would have to conclude it is well worth the outlay and risk of duplication. I cannot claim any huge knowledge of Mussorgsky’s piano works away from the big central piece so this has proved to be a fascinating voyage of discovery. A fact that stares one in the face but I had not really considered before is that Mussorgsky is in scale if not emotional content a miniaturist as far as this repertoire is concerned. Strip away the umbrella title of ‘Pictures’ and in essence you have a series of concentrated tone-poems for piano of which only the final Great Gate lasts for more than five minutes. In fact only one other work recorded here is longer – the nine minute Intermezzo in modo classico – all of which reinforces the impression that in his piano music at least Mussorgsky was a composer who preferred to distil his utterances into concentrated and detailed writing. This in turn makes it vital for the performer to get straight to the heart of the music without time for generalised or discursive gestures. Of the first three works recorded the opening Gopak is the most familiar although Goldstone has chosen an early version of the work which is thereby given its ‘possible first recording’. It sets the tone for the quality to come with dancing rhythms, articulate inner part playing and dynamics carefully controlled. With much of Mussorgsky’s music the extra-musical associations are significant. The next two pieces show different yet important influences. The first is On the Southern Shores of the Crimea . This was written as a response to a concert tour the composer did of that area of Russia and reflects his delight in the folk music he heard there. As Goldstone points out, these are not intended as ‘folk-transcriptions’ but instead are musical postcards or impressions of the country. Hence this piece fuses a melancholy opening and closing evocation of the landscape framing a folk-dance central panel. If musically and emotionally Mussorgsky felt he identified more with the common man than the Russian aristocracy he also found emotional refuge in memories of childhood. This is particularly evident in the pair of pieces From Memories of Childhood [tracks 4 & 5]. Both last barely a minute and a half but they are perfect examples of Mussorgsky’s extraordinary ability to create memorable music on the shortest timescale. The second piece here – Nurse shuts me in a Dark Room – receives its [nominal] first recording, requiring as it did to be completed by Goldstone (the same piece turns up on the ‘complete’ piano works on the Skarbo label played by Sylvie Carbonel but it is unclear if she plays the published incomplete piece or another editor’s version). Both of these nursery pieces have echoes of Chopin’s Etudes but the latter foreshadows elements of Pictures – still a decade in the future. This is a bravura toccata-like work that displays Goldstone’s superb technique and ability to combine power with articulacy and sheer dexterity.

Goldstone’s approach to the main work is narrative rather than episodically virtuosic. The ever-illuminating note links the composer’s careful annotations to the score – as so often amended or ignored by well-meaning editors – to an emotional journey through the gallery of his great friend’s work. The benefit of this is that there is a coherent sweep to the work in toto that is often missing. Goldstone sees the linking Promenade movements in particular as charting the viewer’s journey from nervous indecisiveness to confidently striding. The same emotional arc brings a logic to the placement of the ‘big’ Great Gate as the closing indeed crowning movement not just because of its scale and visceral impact but because the picture itself [a design for a ceremonial gate in Kiev to be built to celebrate Tsar Nicholas II’s escape from assassination] was one of the artist Hartmann’s proudest achievements. Conversely, certain movements are quite deliberately not given the grandstanding virtuoso treatment to which one has grown accustomed. Gnomus [track 8] – although played with all the care and precision one could hope for – does not make the sheer impact here as other versions have. This is one of the Hartmann illustrations that have been lost so it is not possible to be certain just how grotesque Mussorgsky’s Gnome should be. But from here on I have nothing but admiration for this interpretation. Highlights include Il vecchio castello with the lilting lute accompaniment ebbing and flowing to perfection. Goldstone’s phrasing is wonderfully free without being in the slightest mannered – his real skill is the freely phrased song in the right hand over an insistently thrumming left hand. The ox cart Bydlo lumbers splendidly without being simply loud and is in brilliant contrast to skittish Tuileries or Ballet of the unhatched chicks. The latter in particular I do not think I have ever heard so effectively characterised. Goldstone provides the text that Mussorgsky wrote (but subsequently crossed out) elaborating on the gossiping that is the main element of the Limoges – le marché. Curiously, given the lightness of touch elsewhere Goldstone opts for style that echoes the earlier Nursery toccata one imagines more arguing in the market-place rather than gossiping. Catacombs comes across as strikingly modern with a starkness and rhythmic freedom quite beyond most contemporaneous piano music. Likewise the following Cum mortis in lingua mortua which Goldstone sees as a communion between the living composer and his dead friend. Bab-Yaga is another showpiece. Here we do have the Hartmann drawing and it is clear that Mussorgsky has chosen to encapsulate the nightmare character of Russian myth rather than the slightly twee clock of Hartmann’s design. This movement leads without a break into the famous Great Gate . Goldstone is especially good at recreating the effect of the overlapping pealing of bells. This has never been my favourite part of the work – it strikes me that Mussorgsky has to work too hard at creating the overwhelming impact he strove for. Which is no doubt why the piece has been subjected to so many orchestral and other arrangements. Even Goldstone cannot prevent the piece sagging but in its own terms this is a performance the equal of any other. For the rest of the disc we have some more appealing miniature tone-poems for piano and the three alternative versions of movements from Pictures. The long Intermezzo in modo classico does rather outstay its welcome making my comments earlier about Mussorgsky being happiest when creating concentrated pictures in sound seem all the more accurate. The three early versions of the Pictures are again less concentrated than they finally became – the differences are not huge and they are well worth hearing but again the conclusion that concision and quality go hand in hand with Mussorgsky in unavoidable.

So, another fine and valuable addition to this excellent series. If I won’t return to it as often as some of Goldstone’s other contributions to the cycle that is simply because I respond to the musical content of the other discs more. The quality of the performance and presentation here is ideal and for those curious about Mussorgsky the piano composer away from the main cycle this is self-recommending. There are other multiple disc collections that claim varying degrees of completeness. I have not heard any of those sets – variously available on Brilliant Classics and Danacord. For a single disc survey I find it hard to believe the disc under consideration here will be easily beaten.

Mussorgsky piano music is played the way it should be.
It was Modest Mussorgksy’s misfortune to be both unpolished and a colleague of Rimski-Korsakov. Actually, his earthy background gave his music “a raw, even crude, realism, iconoclastic at times, favoring the primitive peasant cul­ture over the gentrified.” Alas, his dealings with Rimski-Korsakov led to the latter’s “improving” his friend’s scores, more often than not rewriting them entirely.

Those words quoted above are from the excellent program notes that accompany the Divine Art CD from its Russian Piano Music Series, “Vol. 8, Modest Mussorgsky.” That record company is lucky to have under contract pianist Anthony Goldstone, who on this disc takes on eight short pieces by Mussorgsky and — of course — the piano version of “Pictures at an Exhibition” which draws upon the composer’s original manu­script. The last three pieces on the disc are movements from “Pictures” with earlier variants from the manuscript. At last, a “Pictures” as the composer intended it. (But I will never desert Ravel’s orchestration of this work.) I must specially praise the program notes by the pianist for the detailed insight into the music he plays on this CD.

It remains one of Krushchev’s more quixotic moves to have presented Ukraine with the Crimea in 1954 , as commemoration of the three hundred years since Little Russia had appealed to join the motherland. Of course he could not foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union , nor the rusting away of the Russian battle fleet in her main naval port of Sebastopol. By contrast , Mussorgsky thoroughly enjoyed three months’ leave there, during which he gave recitals and wrote On the Southern Shore of the Crimea (Gurzuf) , evocative of a Tatar village , with central dance framed by atmospheric subtleties.

Anthony Goldstone continues his recital with Pictures from an Exhibition , which we are now more likely to hear in orchestral transcription . The painter of the watercolours on show was Viktor Hartmann, friend of Mussorgsky who had died recently and was perhaps better known as an architect. Remains of ‘The Great Gate of Kiev ‘, originally built in the Eleventh Century when the city was the most important centre in Russia, still survive.

For good value Goldstone gives earlier versions of three representative ‘pictures’.

In Goldstone’s performance the ‘Great Gate’ and its peal of bells have a massive solidity as assurance that any Polovtsian marauder or perhaps ‘Golden Horde’ invader under the nephew of Genghis Khan might be kept at bay.

The latest volume in Goldstone’s excellent series is dominated by the manuscript version of Mussorgsky’s magnum opus for piano, “Pictures at an Exhibition”, along with unusual variants on several other familiar keyboard works. The composer was, like many of his well known Russian contemporaries, a virtually self-taught amateur, and this gave his work a strikingly novel quality which finds its fullest expression in “Pictures”, the evocative piano suite which depicts an imaginary tour around a posthumous exhibition of his close friend Viktor Hartmann’s work which Mussorgsky had visited in St. Petersburg in 1874.