ArtView November 2015 | Page 47

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,