Leader, J. Mouland Begbie
Conductor, Guy Warrack
Mussorgsky
Prelude ) .
Entr'acte (Act 4) (Khovanshchina) A night on the bare mountain
Introduction and Polonaise (Act 3,
Boris Godunov )
Intermezzo in B minor
Introduction (The Fair of Gopak Sorotchintsy)
In a recent article in The Listener, Gerald Abraham wrote of Mussorgsky that he ' owes his unique position in musical history partly to his creative genius, partly to the paradox that because he was so completely the creature of his time and his environment he was about a quarter of a century in advance of his age. The paradox is easily explained. Mussorgsky's " time and environment" were the Russia of Alexander II, the Russia we know from the novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. His creative career, like Dostoevsky's, almost exactly coincided with the reign of the Liberal Tsar (1855-1881).'
' Mussorgsky's art', he says elsewhere, ' is a manifestation of both the spiritual and intellectual exuberance, the intense aspirations of the period (toward the brotherhood of man, and so on), and a relentless determination to be truthful at all costs, a contempt for that which is merely beautiful.'