| October 2007Mussorgsky’s
piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition is best known in Ravel’s stunning
setting for orchestra, but Ravel, in 1922, was neither the first nor the last to act on
the orchestral character implicit in this keyboard music -- he was simply the best at it.
Some of the other orchestral versions are of interest in their own right; several have
been recorded, and Leonard Slatkin has produced two different composite settings, drawn
from about a dozen of them. The colorful British conductor Sir Henry Wood, an enthusiastic
Russophile (and founder of London’s Promenade Concerts), introduced his version in
1915, and modestly withdrew it when Ravel’s came out. Now it appears in full in a
fascinating collection of Wood’s various transcriptions, recorded in the early 1990s
but apparently unissued until now.
Compared with Ravel's,
Wood's version (which omits the "Promenades," except for the opening one) places
less emphasis on subtlety, more on raw power and
Russian bluntness. His other transcriptions focus similarly on straightforward
exploitation of the coloring Wood preferred -- organ pedal, large bells and general bigness.
His exuberantly virtuosic scoring of Bach’s D minor Toccata and Fugue, made a bit
later than the famous Stokowski version, was initially ascribed to a fictional "Paul
Klenovsky" to avoid the critics’ dismissal of a mere "conductor’s
transcription." Wood did fess up, and Toscanini was among those who performed the
piece. Wood’s treatment of Debussy’s Cathédrale engloutie, a memorial
gesture just after the composer’s death, has held its own over the years, as have his
transcriptions of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor and the Funeral March from
Chopin’s Second Sonata. The other items here -- a virtually unknown Polish Dance by
Xaver Scharwenka, a familiar Spanish Dance by Granados, Grieg’s Funeral March for
Rikard Nordraak -- are all richly appealing, and the Pictures is meaty enough to be
enjoyed in alternation with the Ravel version, though it presents no serious challenge to
the Ravel’s status.
The recording quality is first-rate throughout, doing
complete justice to Wood’s colorful scoring, and Lewis Foreman’s annotation is
helpfully informative.
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Orchestrations by Sir Henry Wood:
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Pieces by Seven Other Composers
