Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky
Selections from the famous piano solo arranged by Neal Corwell for wind soloist with piano
Instrumentation: solo (euph, or trumpet, sax, clarinet, bassoon) with piano accompaniment
Copyright: 2021
Duration: Total Time: 19:00 (if one chooses to perform all 9 movements)
individual movements: range in time from 1:00 to 4:00
Range: BB-flat (or E with ossia) to c-2 (for euphonium/bassoon)
Difficulty: IV
Publisher: Nicolai Music
Price: $15 for solo with piano version
Other Info: Both bass and b-flat treble solo parts provided. Neal Corwell premiered, with his wife Kathryn as accompanist, during during the Fall of 2021.
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Modest Mussorgsky composed Pictures at an Exhibition in 1874 as a memorial to his friend, the painter Viktor Hartmann. Shortly after Hartmann’s death in 1873, Mussorgsky visited a retrospective exhibit of his artwork, and subsequently composed this work based on ten of the paintings. This fiendishly difficult piano solo was not published during Mussorgsky’s lifetime. It was, however, eventually brought to the attention of several musicians as source material to be arranged for orchestra. A few took up the challenge, to include Sir Henry Wood, Leopold Stokowski and Walter Goehr, but the best known orchestration is the one by Maurice Ravel, which catapulted Mussorgsky’s music to fame in 1922.
Mussorgsky’s full work includes 16 movements. Nine of the sixteen have been selected for this arrangement, The chosen movements are: Promenade, The Gnome, The Old Castle, Children at Play, Bydlo (The Oxcart), Ballet of Chicks in their Shells, Two Polish Jews, Babi-Yaga, & The Great Gate of Kiev. The soloist may perform this suite in its entirety, or choose selected movements, even altering the order of movements if desired.
Liberties have been taken to make the music more playable. Some movements have been transposed to a more practical key signature, a few long and/or repeated passages have been deleted, and occasionally a small passage has been slightly altered to make it more idiomatically feasible. Particular attention has been paid to re-interpreting the piano part substantially so that it is now quite approachable, and not even remotely as challenging as the original. The wind soloist is given many opportunities for a variety of styles of expressive playing, and the technical difficulties are moderate. Brass players are given the option of using mutes for some of the movements. In the saxophone version, the soloist is given the opportunity to utilize different instruments within the sax family.