Translation of the German review:

Originally composed in 1874 by Modest Mussorgsky as a piano cycle, the program music "Pictures at an Exhibition" was predestined to be transcribed for an orchestra due to its broad musical spectrum. Of the many different versions, Maurice Ravel's arrangement from 1922 attracted worldwide attention and became the best-known version. Modest Mussorgsky's paintings and drawings by Viktor Hartmann served as models for the individual movements. Their mutual friend and art critic Vladimir Stasov encouraged the creation of the work.

In March 1874, the memorial exhibition for Viktor Hartmann took place at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. As many of these pictures no longer exist, we can only speculate about the actual sources. Even if they were the product of Mussorgsky's imagination, the movements of the composition have exciting names. They were realized in a musically appealing way and transported the listeners into a stimulating world of thoughts of a tour through Viktor Hartmann's exhibition.

The piece Promenade runs through the entire work as a varying, recurring theme and is intended to portray Mussorgsky as a viewer of the exhibition. It serves as a bridge between the very differently set pictures and puts the listener in a solemn and festive mood right at the beginning of the album with its very beautiful wind and orchestral movements. In the first picture, Gnomus, the orchestra can pull out all the stops for the musical interpretation of the deformed dwarf: His fidgeting, jumping, shaking, limping and stumbling, creeping and freezing are accurately traced by the very fine use of instrumental groups. After a quiet version of the Promenade with a remarkable orchestral writing, Mussorgsky moves on to The Old Castle. This piece is characterized on the one hand by a wistful but at the same time truly grand mood and flows just as one might imagine a walk in front of a sublime building. A short insertion of the Promenade leads to the Tuileries. The musical depiction of frolicking children being urgently but futilely admonished by their guardians in a famous Parisian park is played lively, but less spectacularly than I would have expected. The term Bydło comes from the Polish word for cattle. You can imagine a cart pulled by oxen, majestic and powerful, but also ponderous, marching past under the muffled steps of the draught animals and disappearing into the distance again. The Promenade introduces the next change of mood in a very beautiful variation: The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks lives from the carefreeness and lightness of freshly hatched chicks, who take their first steps into the world under their peeping. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle represent two different contemporaries engaged in a dispute: Goldenberg is rich and stolid, Schmuÿle is considered poor and torn down: A thundering melodic line with low strings contrasts with a flat and wailing line with crowing winds. Next, the listener is invited to the lively and noisy The Market at Limoges. The piece escalates into a wild staccato storm until the transition to the next image. If you are in Paris and have good nerves, you should book a tour through the catacombs. These are long tunnels under the city that lead to rooms where thousands of human bones and skulls are kept. The Catacombs describe Hartmann's musical walk through these vaulted cellars. We hear powerful, menacing and terrifying chords in a gloomy mood, very fitting! And then: The Hut on Fowl’s Legs. The witch lives in a dark forest, where she ambushes unsuspecting passers-by with her eerie-sounding luring calls, aligns her hut standing on chicken feet towards them, lures her victims in loudly, demanding and compellingly and finally eats them. The piece is characterized by the pounding of a pestle-driven mortar on which she rides. The album cover shows the graphic design of a city gate with a bell tower for the piece The Great Gate of Kiev. The majestic grandeur of the gate is sketched out in a pompous finale in the final piece.

Night on Bald Mountain is the only major orchestral work by Modest Mussorgsky and is often performed in conjunction with Pictures at an Exhibition. This symphonic poem, which was arranged by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and celebrated by a large audience, is considered one of the best-known examples of Russian program music of the 19th century. It describes the dance of the witches on St. John's night on the bare mountain (Lysaya gora), a place in Slavic mythology that is considered a meeting place for witches. Mussorgsky's score from 1867 contains the following subheadings: "Assembly of Witches and their Chatter", "Satan's Procession", "Black Mass" and "Witches' Sabbath". Rimsky-Korsakov shortened the Sabbath and added a village church bell ringing in the distance at the climax of the celebration to drive away the spirits of darkness.

This master tape copy is very suitable for listening at a high volume. Thanks to the low signal-to-noise ratio, the nuances of the music can be heard very well in the quieter moments. The tutti passages stand pompously in the room, only to fall silent the next moment and transition into new, sometimes filigree and playful musical images. In comparison to other recordings, the conductor Igor Markevitch managed to bring out the passion and energy of the orchestra in an outstanding way and lend the work an almost celebratory mood, far removed from a gimmicky note. I would describe both works as unique and timeless in their composition, execution and entertainment value. The original tapes were remastered in analog by Chistoph Stickel (CS-Mastering). This means that tape lovers have a very valuable piece of music history at their disposal in impressive quality.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)