Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (piano version)

Garrick Ohlsson's latest recording for Bridge combines new studio recordings of major compositions by Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff with one of the great American pianist's own favorite “live” performances- a 1974 reading of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, given in Prague.

Sony Masterworks expands the catalogue of its Carnegie Hall Presents series with a set of previously unreleased recordings by legendary pianist Vladimir Horowitz, one of the most important performers of classical music in the twentieth century. The Sony Masterworks release of the three albums in The Private Collection makes these dazzling performances, previously held in the archives of Yale University as part of Horowitz’s papers, available to the public for the first time.

In 1988, a year before his death, Horowitz donated to Yale University a treasure trove of original recordings composed of Carnegie Hall concerts and performances he gave during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Horowitz had employed an engineer to make 78-rpm recordings of his Carnegie Hall concerts in this period, and he used them to review and judge his performances. Most of these mono recordings were originally contained on 12- and 16-inch acetate discs. They have been impeccably mastered, with the sound restored, from new transfers made in the Yale archives. Significant press accompanied the original announcement of the donation of these recordings to Yale, where Horowitz performed often through the years and was an assistant fellow of Silliman College.

Leif Ove Andsnes embarks on a major project which marks a new departure for the internationally acclaimed pianist. Together with South African-born visual artist Robin Rhode he has created a special programme entitled Pictures Reframed which centres around Mussorgsky's epic piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition combining music, film and still imagery.

"There are pieces of music where you feel everything's there, everything is said" comments Andsnes. "Pictures at an Exhibition is the opposite, making it a perfect composition to experiment with as Mussorgsky's music is incredibly strong but also very open and experimental. The main thing isn't the notes themselves, but the composer's grand vision. For me therefore, the original version of the work remains almost as a sketch that is open for transformations and changes. You have this wild narrative of a person walking into an exhibition and he crashes into the first picture and is faced with various strong images and textures. Later in the cycle he becomes a part of the picture and it takes on so many aspects. Its psychologically challenging, I think."

Leif Ove Andsnes and Robin Rhode share a mutual fascination with Pictures at an Exhibition. Rhode had already been experimenting with images based on Mussorgsky's work and his 2008 digital animation "Promenade" has become the opening sequence for Pictures Reframed. With its characterful and constantly changing interplay between actor and drawing it fittingly sets the scene for the musical narrative to come. "I have always worked very closely with music" Rhode says "playing with the notion of rhythm and sound. This new project is not, therefore, so distant from my regular practice although classical music has such an intense history and that will be a difficult challenge."

Robin Rhode and Leif Ove Andsnes met for the first time in Munich in September 2007 and ideas for the programme have been evolving ever since, moving from piano to studio and back to piano. One of their early meetings took place in a derelict Berlin factory where Rhode started to draw on the bare wall - a backdrop that is often featured in his work, stemming from his introduction to art on the streets of Johannesburg. As Rhode embellished the imaginary instrument Andsnes stepped forward to perform on it, bringing another dimension to Rhode's playful and often illusionary work.

Sa Chen’s previous CD of the Chopin Piano Concertos on PentaTone got excellent reviews: “Sa Chen has that rare unteachable ability to tug at the heart-strings.” Classic FM Magazine. Here she plays Pictures in their original piano version and Night in Rimsky-Korsakov’s version but transcribed for piano by Konstantin N. Chernov.

The Georgian pianist Nino Gvetadze was born in 1981 and studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. Since winning the YPF National Piano Competition in 2004, she has appeared with many leading orchestras and performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Modest Mussorgsky’s turbulent and muddled life somehow enabled him to become one of the most visionary and innovative composers in Russia in the 19th century. ‘Art is not an end in itself, but a means of conversing with one’s fellow creatures’ he wrote in his autobiography. This view may in some way explain the inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies in his music. He had been called a ‘barbarian’ by some of his colleagues, and even his friend and fellow member of ‘The Mighty Handful’ (the group of five leading Russian nationalist composers) Rimsky-Korsakov thought he lacked refinement.

His vivid tonal pallette was to become an important influence on composers such as Debussy and Ravel, the latter famously orchestrating Mussorgksy’s piano masterpiece Pictures at an Exhibition. The original is the main work on this disc which includes all his extant works for solo piano. Much of his output for piano dates from his early years as a composer, and two piano sonatas, in E flat major and F minor, have sadly been lost.

New recording, containing pieces that are rarely recorded.

One of a series of releases highlighting the winners of the principal prizes at the prestigious YPF Young Pianist Foundation’s National Piano Competition in Holland.

‘A musician to be reckoned with.’ De Telegraaf