Musical Portraits and Self-Portraits

This week Donald Macleod explores the music of Mussorgsky, with a particular focus on his songs. Today, Pictures from an Exhibition, in its original piano version, and the song-cycle The Nursery.

In August 1873 the painter and architectural designer Viktor Hartmann, a close friend of Mussorgsky's, suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack. Early the following year an exhibition of around 400 of his images - including watercolours, architectural sketches and costume designs - was mounted in St Petersburg in his honour. As his own memorial to Hartmann, Mussorgsky selected ten of the pictures to illustrate in music, adding five intermezzi in the form of 'promenades', to suggest the composer's own progress through the exhibition. His charming song-cycle The Nursery is a memorial of a different kind - to his own lost childhood, or at least an idealized version of it.

'Gathering mushrooms'
Boris Christoff, baritone
Alexandre Labinsky, piano

Pictures from an Exhibition - A remembrance of Viktor Hartmann
Mikhail Pletnev, piano

With Nursey; In the Corner; The Beetle; With the Doll; Evening Prayer; On the Hobby-Horse (The Nursery)
Marjana Lipovšek, mezzo soprano
Graham Johnson, piano.