Fritz Reiner/CSO - Moussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (1958) 24-Bit/96-kHz Vinyl Rip

There are many great things to enjoy, but what really jumped out at me in this recording was Ravel’s astonishingly good orchestration. We’ve all heard the music umpteen times, and, like many comfortable things, we tend to take it for granted. Reiner and his heroes will refresh your memory of Ravel’s (and Moussorgsky’s) genius with unassailable playing and a rich interpretation. Like all great things, it just seems right. The magic continues with the warm recorded sound. The soundstage is wide if not deep, and imaging is similar to the hall perspective.
(Anthony Kershaw - Audiophilia Classics)

In the 1860s, a wave of aesthetic nationalism swept through Russia. Architects like Victor Hartmann abandoned the classic domes and columns that had given St. Petersburg a Roman air and went in for structure and ornament based on medieval and contemporary folk styles. Composers like Modest Moussorgsky sought the materials of a new idiom in Russian folk music and the subjects for opera and song in Russian history and in the life about them. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that Hartmann and Moussorgsky were friends.
Hartmann died in 1873, and in the spring of the following year about 400 of his works were displayed in the rooms of St. Petersburg Society of Architects. Moussorgsky attended the Hartmann memorial exhibition, to which he had lent some drawings from his own collection, and wrote a suite for piano inspired by ten of the things he saw there. No one paid much attention to this work until 1922, when Ravel orchestrated it at the request of Serge Koussevitzky.
For half a century, therefore, no special reason existed for interest in the work of Hartmann. His drawings were scattered, most of them disappeared, and several of Moussorgsky's biographers have stated that they are all beyond recovery. The writer of these lines, however, had the good fortune to locate about seventy of the 400 pictures that were in the exhibition Moussorgsky saw. The most important of these may be found in The Musical Quarterly for July, 1939, and in an illustrated edition of the original piano score published by the International Music Company of New York.
(Alfred Frankenstein - San Francisco Chronicle)

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conductor: Fritz Reiner

Track Listing:

Side 1:
- Promenade
- Gnomus
- Il Vecchio Castello
- Tuileries
- Bydlo
- Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells
- Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuyle

Side 2:
- The Market Place at Limoges
- Catacombae, Sepulchrum Romanum
- Con Mortuis in Lingua Mortua
- The Hut on Fowl's Legs
- The Great Gate of Kiev