(Section A)
Leader, Paul Beard
Conducted by Clarence Raybould
Bax does not usually offer programmes to his music, but on this occasion he has disclosed that it is his intention to give an impression of the castle-crowned cliff of Tintagel and ' more especially of the long distances of the Atlantic, as seen from the cliffs of Cornwall on a sunny, but not windless, summer day. The literary and historical associations of the scene also enter into the scheme '.
Whether or not you are familiar with the wild beauty of that unique corner of the Cornish coastline, you cannot fail to feel the surge of the sea in this modern work, just as three generations have done in the inimitable ' Hebrides ' Overture.
1 The gnome. 2 The old castle. 3 The Tuileries: Children quarrelling at play. 4 Bydlo: The Polish ox-waggon. 5 Ballet of the chickens emerging from their shells. 6 Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle. 7 The market at Limoges. 8 The catacombs. 9 The hut of Baba-Yaga. 10 The great gate of Kiev
In 1873 Victor Hartmann , a well-known architect and painter, member of Balakirev's circle and close friend of Stassov, the critic, and Mussorgsky, died at the early age of thirty-nine. Mussorgsky was deeply upset, and in the following year when Stassov arranged an exhibition of Hartmann's water-colours and drawings, he was moved to compose a cycle of ten piano pieces based on various subjects from Hartmann's pictures. These he entitled ' Pictures from an Exhibition '.
Mussorgsky appears to have been highly stimulated with the idea, for in a letter to Stassov, to whom the work is dedicated, he says: ' Hartmann is bubbling over, just as Boris Godunov did. Ideas, melodies, come to me of their own accord ... I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.'