Modest Mussorgski, Maurice Ravel

Tableaux d'une exposition

Click here for the original version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

Ravel's ingenious compositional interpretation is still the best-known and most independent orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition. When the French composer turned to Mussorgsky's piano cycle at the height of his mastery in 1922, Paris was completely under the spell of Russian music. Ravel's orchestration, precisely notated in the score autograph, is successful from the start. Jean-Francois Monnard, already responsible as editor for the Breitkopf Urtext editions of Bolero , La Valse and Rapsodie espagnole, presents a musical text that is coherent in every detail. The edition not only clears up many previously undiscovered errors, it also provides a wealth of practical information on the long and multifaceted performance history, including metronome indications of great conductors who were associated with the work in a special way. Bibliography : Mayer , Stephan: Sunshine for the Soul. Ein lehrreicher Nachmittag am Genfer See, in: Musikforum, 2015, Heft 4, pp. 32-35.