The Castle at Chernomor, Victor Hartmann
Audience question: Could you say something
about how the music reveals the pictures in the
exhibition, from your own experience?
Straight away with Pictures at an Exhibition the
first thing that comes on is the Promenade, which is
the thread, it's the narrative. Russians are very, very
big into theatre - ballet but especially theatre - and
Mussorgsky is doing a number of things with this
Promenade. He is actually transporting us to where
he is, but he's also breaking that third wall down,
because it's like the composer or the director or the
auteur is looking at the camera, saying "come with
me", so there's a beckoning quality to it. Straight
away we can hear even before the first movement
happens, even before Gnomus there's a sense of
expectancy. Or you can feel right before the
Children Playing movement that he's walking a
little bit faster. So as I was saying before there's this
incredible way that only the greatest of
compositional geniuses achieve: with sound they
can achieve something that is actually physical,
with colour but also a sense of matter. That's really
what genius is, isn't it? It's taking something that
doesn't exist and making it exist. It's creation. That's
what I love about this piece.
Back to creation - are you trying to recreate
what Mussorgsky is portraying, or are you
putting your own interpretation on what he's
saying?
Again, that's one of the huge questions. A lot of
people take the view that everything is written on
the score - the composer wrote it on the score and if
you do what the composer said, then that is enough,
and you should not do any more. But the Russians
have long had this view that there is a hidden
meaning to the music: there is what's on the page,
but there is what's behind the notes as well. If you
start looking into this too much it can become
inauthentic in a way, and then anything you do can
be a superimposed identity onto the music. Kind of
like they do with pop music - like I'm going to go
for this sort of look or this sort of sound - whereas it
has to be authentic and that's where the great
leveller which is time comes in. Because if you
have sufficient time with a piece that happens
organically. I found that my playing of this piece
changed quite a lot over five months, from the
recording until the recent performance. When I
recorded it, it was more conservative and when I
performed it,