Ashkenazy conducts final concert of the season in Leicester
Mon 20 Jun 2005, 7:30pm
De Montfort Hall, Leicester
Vladimir Ashkenazy conductor
Yundi Li piano
| Balakirev | Islamey |
|---|---|
| Liszt | Piano Concerto No. 1 |
| Mussorgsky (arr. Ashkenazy) | Pictures at an Exhibition |
When the Russian architect Victor Hartmann died in 1873, the writer Vladimir Stasov and several other of Hartmann's friends and associates arranged a memorial exhibition of some 400 drawings and paintings by the architect. One of the visitors to the gallery was Mussorgsky, a good friend of Stasov, who had long admired Hartmann's work. Within a few months of the exhibition, Mussorgsky had composed a suite of piano pieces based on some of his favourite drawings. The form of this suite was unusual: it portrayed the composer himself walking through the gallery, standing before several pictures and forming his own musical impressions of each one. Several musicians have since chosen to orchestrate this work, of whom the most famous is probably Ravel.
The encore performed at this concert was Tchaikovsky's Waltz from Sleeping Beauty.
