If someone asked you to name a world-famous Russian pictorial artist, who would you come up with? (Employees of MHS and their families and professors of Russian art are ineligible for this quiz.) Well, the only name that occurs to me is that of Victor Hartmann. Even there, I have my doubts: there is no "h" phoneme in Russian and Shakespeare's tragedy comes out "Gamlet," but Hartmann (no relation to the late late Mary) is always "Hartmann" and no one ever explains why--much less how.
In spite of his world-fame, Victor Alexandrovitch was no Raphael. In fact, he was primarily an architect, and a good deal of the 1874 memorial exhibition that inspired Mussorgsky was given over to sketches for buildings and nutcrackers and things. (The Gnome was purportedly a projected caisse-noisette; the Great Gate at Kiev was an entry in a contest for a design for a gate to memorialize Alexander Il's escape from an assassination attempt, and looks more like a stylized brick camel than it does like anything else.) Mussorgsky didn't know Hartmann all that well, but he found him highly simpatico and was so distressed by his unexpected demise that he sold off his furniture and clothes to finance a behemothian memorial jag. The compositions came later. Of course Mussorgsky never got around to orchestrating them. Liadov wanted to, but he was even less energetic than Mussorgsky. Other people did, to no great effect until Maurice Ravel uncannily read and actualized Mussorgsky's orchestra implications.
Even if one knows those of Hartmann's pictures that still exist, when one thinks of them one is apt to see instead their transcendental musical rendering, whatever that means. The Gnome is a snarling, threatening monster. Bydlo, the Polish oxcart, is no less than juggernaut. Samuel Goldenberg is a vastly inflated windbag and Schmuyle a cringing, fawning nasality --caricatures that no contemporary composer could get away with. (Who named them, no one knows for sure; Hartmann's ghetto sketch was called simply "Two Polish Jews, One Rich, One Poor.") Baba-Yaga's traveling hut is jet-propelled. And the Great Gate is the World Trade Building in gold and diamonds. For me only the sentimental pseudo-medieval Old Castle misses fire; M.D. Calvocoressi, in his study of Mussorgsky, terms it a failure.
"Night on Bald Mountain" is properly called "St. John's Night on Bald Mountain." The Feast of St. John coincides with the summer solstice, in pagan times devoted to fertility rites, and later allegedly given over to the big annual All-Europe witches' sabbath, which is what Mussorgsky was trying to depict. The work was ostensibly inspired by a Gogol story, and was later conceived as part of the (otherwise unwritten) incidental music for a play "The Witches" by Baron Mengden. Mussorgsky actually got around to scoring it. Later he used this material in a dream-sequence for the (unfinished) opera ''The Fair at Sorochinsk." The Rimsky version is a brilliant piece, but no more than a free fantasia on Mussorgsky's ideas. I know of no recording of the original, though Leopold Stokowski tells us that his version embodies what seem to him the composer's most inspired pages.
Why another recording of these works? Well, I'd say (a) the Leipzig orchestra and (b) the too-long-delayed return to the recording scene of Igor Markevitch, who around 1960 was one of the most-recorded of all conductors (DGG, Angel, Philips, London, etc.)
