everything that is good, and everything that is bad
about humanity. It's a universal piece, and it's so
universal and so enormous and so grand in its scope
that not only musicians but artists have looked to it
as this... in the same way that we look to Bach's
music - it transcends genre and it transcends taste
even, and it can't simply be described. You can't say
it's a modernist piece or a romantic piece, it's simply
Pictures at an Exhibition... Phew!
That's a fabulous description actually... it was
written in the 1800s and throughout history it's
been played by many great musicians and
performers. How is it that you go about putting
your own mark on this piece, to what degree do
you have creativity within it?
This is the eternal question that many a musician is
tortured over, and indeed many an artist who is
befuddled by what has come before him, but also
awed by what needs to come after him or her... and
the thing about Pictures at an Exhibition - it's like
the Art of Fugue by Bach, or the Goldberg
Variations, there are so many competing forces.
When I was asked to record this piece, I was
immediately awed and I was of course very
humbled, but then the big questions come... you
think of the famous recording by Sviatoslav Richter
- to what degree do I listen to that, to what degree
do I not listen to that? I was drawn back to I think it
was Orson Welles who said either know nothing or
everything, and I chose to know nothing. Also the
great jazz pianist Bill Evans who said you have to
come from a place of freshness of the layman - he
trusts the layman above everybody. That's why I
decided to go in with a completely clean slate,
because my feeling is that a great piece of music
like this is like a Rorschach ink blot, it is whatever
the musician or interpreter projects upon the canvas,
or in my case, the 88 keys.
Do you take time to understand the historical
context in which the piece was written - or do
you mean a blank slate where you just approach
it completely without any knowledge?
Another very difficult question because the
historical context can't be ignored at all. Just in the
same way that while there's no right or wrong in art,
there are clearly manifestly tasteless or very tasteful
things to do in the context of art, so these are
questions with no clearly definable answer. Yet
there are clearly wrong things to do, so I had to be
aware of the fact that it was written in 1875, I had to
be aware of who else was around at that time, such
as Rimsky-Korsakov, I had to be aware of... Who
was Mussorgsky? He was a very rare person, who
was not only part of an enormous culture but he saw
his culture from outs