Modest Mussorgky's Pictures at an Exhibition is one of the best loved piano suites of all time: its musical imagery seems so vivid and tangible. It has spawned any number of adaptations, ranging from the frequently performed orchestration by Ravel to the 1971s synthesizer-heavy progressive rock version by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Every performer and arranger of the work superposes their own interpretation of the pictures that Mussorgsky tried to depict in the music.

The Internet being what it is, one can now find renderings of Hartmann's original paintings and sketches that inspired the work. Some of them can be identified fairly reliably; some of them are not much more than guesses on the part of historians. Here's a quick handy guide: it covers all the pictures in the music except the Tuileries, which no-one seems to have any good ideas for. The best site I found most of these from is this Japanese site: there are also several of the pictures on Wikipedia and on the BBC web site.

Plenty of other places to find more, but I couldn't resist getting these together in one place! Enjoy...

11th March 2010

We've just had an "interesting" experience failing to book tickets for a heavily oversubscribed festival (not classical, as it happens). Tickets went on sale at 9am today, with several authorised outlets available. At 9am, we were online attempting to log in to various websites while at the same time trying the phone numbers.

Clearly, several tens of thousands of other people were doing the same, because every one of the websites either keeled over completely or gave "we're very busy, try again in xxx" before eventually admitting to being sold out. The phone numbers didn't do much better: most simply gave a busy tone. An hour or so later, websites were up and running again indicating "sold out", so presumably it was the luck of the draw: if you happened to be one of the ones where the website replied or you happened to hit the phone at the right split second, you got your tickets.

This process, whereby tickets go on sale at a set time, can't be sensible. it must be hell for the people in the call centres, a nightmare for whoever is designing the ticketing websites, and is a monumental waste of time for everyone trying to buy tickets. There has to be a better way of doing ticketing for very popular events.

It makes me realise that the Proms system of doing a ballot works pretty well for this. If you put aside the evil capitalist thought that maybe the tickets are underpriced (or maybe they should be auctioned), a ballot would work quite well. It could be opened as soon as ticket prices are known: at this point, everyone who wants tickets can input their details and requests at leisure. The ballot would then be done at a stated closing date. It's not completely trivial to write the software which sifts through the various requests doing its best to satisfy as many people as possible while being fair on everyone, but the task should be well within the abilities of a decent developer. Certainly, it's a considerably easier task than making a ticketing site work at several thousand times its usual traffic level.

Rock festivals aren't the only people with this problem - could the ticketing people in opera houses and major classical venues also listen?

David Karlin
5th March 2010

Having just spent a great evening listening to Shostakovich's large scale works at the Royal Festival Hall (see the review), it was fascinating to listen to a work on a very much smaller scale - at least instrumentally - in the shape of his D minor Cello Sonata. This was played last night by the new pairing of cellist Gemma Rosefield and pianist Katya Apekisheva in a private run-through as preparation for a concert next week.

The smaller forces involved belie the scale of Shostakovich's ambition. The music is a perpetual motion machine, constantly taking you from one mental place to another. You really have no idea what's coming next: it could be despair, languour, cheerfulness, calm or thoughtfulness and is always laced with Shostakovich's ironic humour. The whole piece is also musically eclectic, with themes, harmonies and rhythms taken, it would seem, from anything the composer could lay his hands on. It was written in 1934 at what must have been a low point in Shostakovich's life - in the middle of a temporary divorce from his wife Nina (they subsequently re-married) and just after the production of the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which was soon to cause mayhem and danger in Shostakovich's life when Stalin officially denounced it.

The "perpetuum mobile" feel was particularly evident in the second movement, which Rosefield and Apekisheva played with demonic verve. The following slow movement was achingly beautiful.

The concert is on Wednesday 10th March at St Paul's School in Barnes, West London. It also includes music by Beethoven, Schumann and Mendelssohn. Well worth a trip...

5th March 2010

When you're in Italy, classical music does seem to crop up in some unlikely places.

We're just back from our annual family skiing trip, for which we went to the beautiful resort of Madonna di Campiglio in the Dolomites - more precisely, the Trentino region of Italy. It's an area with strong Austrian heritage, the scene of bitter fighting in World War I, and Habsburg era memorabilia abound, so the week's "Habsburg Carnival" included a torchlit ski-procession with skiing couples clad in hussar-style pelisses and hooped crinoline dresses executing their neat turns to the strains of The Blue Danube. Since this took over twenty minutes, it was probably more along the lines of the "extended disco remix" of The Blue Danube.

But as in my blog from Venice last year, the prize has to go to an elderly busker. He was a slim, active man with a shock of curly grey hair, playing his flute in the main square of the resort. We listened to a full length rendition of the first movement of Mozart's Symphony no. 40, arranged as a sort of flute concerto for him and a backing track. He played with great gusto, dancing as he went (which actually made him quite difficult to photograph!)

I'm not sure what the British equivalent of Madonna di Campiglio would be (a surf beach in Cornwall, perhaps), but whatever it is, I suspect that it wouldn't include an elderly gentleman playing and dancing to Mozart?

David Karlin
22nd February 2010