Ravel’s orchestration of Musorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition, which I am conducting in concert with WASO next week, is a popular staple of the repertoire. Thanks to the wonderful Spotify, which in Sweden and selected other countries enables unlimited listening to a massive library of music of all kinds, I have been trawling through recordings, from Reiner to Giulini (who I observed rehearsing Pictures with the Philharmonia in London in 1988 or so).

On my travels through Spotify, I came across Oliver Knussen’s recording of Pictures with, I think, the Cleveland Orchestra - not the Ravel, however, but the orchestration by Stokowski. Ollie’s conducting and the quality of the orchestral playing are equally vivid and memorable, and it set me to thinking about transcriptions more widely.

The brilliance of Ravel’s orchestration is unquestioned, but it is the only transcription of his I can think of where others, before and since, have made their own versions. Not only Stokowski, but more recently Ashkenazy. And on reflection the reasons for this cast an interesting light on the whole subject.

The edition of Pictures from which Ravel worked was the Rimsky-Korsakov, at that time the foremost (and quite possibly only available) edition. Even taking this into account, some of Ravel’s  choices are unusual, particularly the saxophone solo in the Castello movement. But more fundamentally, musical details in the Rimsky-Korsakov edition differ from the critical edition of Pictures which appeared after Ravel’s death, and which you can find today on IMSLP. Bydlo, which begins pianissimo in Rimsky and thus Ravel, should start at a full-throated fortissimo. In Stokowski, as performed by Knussen, this attack is thrilling - all the more so because it shows how accustomed we have become to the Ravel! And there are some further details, including note lengths and pitches, which really alter the tone of passages throughout Pictures more generally.

If an orchestration can be imagined as the act of costuming a body, then Ravel’s Pictures is like Coco Chanel dressing Peter the Great. There is a degree of distance between the finesse and clarity of Ravel and the iron ore of Musorgsky’s original. This distance in general results in a beautiful complementariness between style and substance, but we hear the Ravel so often that these two have become somewhat fused in our minds. At some moments, I believe, Ravel transcends Musorgsky; in general he transmits the essence of the piece; but at others he fails to do its granite-like strength justice.

For this reason, although I love and revel in the version I will be conducting next week, I would be happy if the other, competing orchestrations got more frequent airings. Because Ravel is not to be confused with Musorgsky, and neither are Stokowski or Ashkenazy. But, as we get acquainted with them - just as we listen to Richter and others in the original piano version - we can develop a more variegated understanding. Things easily become hackneyed when they are always viewed from the same perspective. In the case of Pictures, we have the possibility of a triangulation, a variety of perspectives, through which we can view Musorgsky’s prismatic richness.

©Brad Cohen 2011

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