Mussorgsky wrote his Pictures at an Exhibition in honour of a friend - a painter called Vladimir Hartmann who had died at the peak of his career, aged just 39.
The pieces in Pictures mostly try to capture in music the sketches, watercolours and architectural designs that were shown publicly at the Hartmann exhibition. Mussorgsky links his sketches together with a musical Promenade in which he depicts himself moving from one picture to the next. Pictures at an Exhibition is most often heard nowadays not in its original piano version but in orchestrated form. Many musicians, from Henry Wood to Leopold Stokowski, have arranged the work for full orchestra, but it’s far and away the 1922 version by Maurice Ravel that receives the most regular performance and praise today.
