557645 bk Stokowski US 14/06/2005 03:44pm Page 8 Leopold STOKOWSKI MUSSORGSKY Symphonic Transcriptions Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) STOKOWSKI 1 A Night on Bare Mountain (1939) 9:17 Pictures at an Exhibition 2 Entr’acte to Act IV of Khovanshchina (1922) 5:25 3 Symphonic Synthesis of Boris Godunov (1936) 24:21 Boris Godunov • Night on Bare Mountain Pictures at an Exhibition (1939) Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra 4 Promenade 2:04 5 Gnomus 2:21 6 Promenade 1:10 José Serebrier 7 Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle) 3:39 8 Bydlo (A Polish Ox-Wagon) 2:40 9 Promenade 1:03 0 Ballet de poussins dans leurs coques (Ballet of the Chickens in their Shells) 1:16 ! Samuel Goldberg and Schmuyle 2:40 @ Catacombs - Sepulchrum Romanum; Con mortuis in lingua mortua 3:44 # La cabane sur des pattes de poule (The Hut on Fowl’s Legs) 2:58 $ La grande porte de Kiev (The Great Gate of Kiev) 5:15 Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) % Humoresque, Op. 10, No. 2 (1941) 2:11 ^ Solitude, Op. 73, No. 6 (1936) 3:26 Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) & Traditional Slavic Christmas Music (1933) 3:18 8.557645 8 557645 bk Stokowski US 14/06/2005 03:44pm Page 2 Symphonic transcriptions by Leopold Stokowski One of the reasons Leopold Stokowski decided to make his opera Boris Godunov in the Rimsky-Korsakov version; own orchestral version of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Stokowski gave the U.S. première of the original version in Mountain was to get closer to the original, bolder and wilder 1929. Over the years, Stokowski experimented with several version, as opposed to Rimsky-Korsakov’s cleaner, concert versions with singers, eventually leading to the westernized revision. In fact, Stokowski’s version is present orchestral synthesis, following the order of the actually close to Rimsky-Korsakov’s in content and form, opera. He links them together with sequences using only while faithful to the original Mussorgsky in the deep chimes and low gongs, two of his favorite instruments. orchestration. The 1940 Disney film was a perfect vehicle Strangely, these bridges sound more like Ives than for Stokowski’s grandiose vision of the work. Mussorgsky Mussorgsky. Stokowski confessed to me that he was never worked on it in one way or another throughout his short life. entirely satisfied, and kept changing the sequences and the In 1866 it was his first large-scale orchestral work, St John’s ending, sometimes adding choirs, all of which seems Night on the Bare Mountain based on Gogol’s story St appropriate when dealing with Mussorgsky, as he himself John’s Eve (twenty years later Rimsky-Korsakov made his left most of his music in disarray, and was constantly famous revision and orchestration). Mussorgsky had been changing and re-arranging Boris and other works, making commissioned to write an opera based on a drama by new versions, adding and removing entire acts. Boris was Mengden, called The Witch, and while he never fulfilled the not that well known in the first part of the twentieth century, commission, the motives he sketched for it were used and Stokowski felt that a symphonic version would help in several times, finally as a choral piece in one of his last, bringing this great music to the attention of a wider unfinished operas, Mlada. This composite project would audience. have employed several composers, Rimsky-Korsakov, The piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition was Borodin, Cui, Minkus and Mussorgsky, but this composed in 1874. There were already several orchestral collaborative effort never quite materialized. But this versions of it by the time Serge Koussevitzky Witches’ Sabbath music haunted Mussorgsky, perhaps commissioned Maurice Ravel in 1922. His marvelous because he never heard a performance of his orchestral orchestration was based on the Rimsky-Korsakov revision version during his lifetime. Mussorgsky also used these of the piano score, which contained errors and omissions. motives in his last stage work, the comic opera The Fair at Stokowski felt that Ravel’s was a great orchestral work, but Sorochintsï, from 1877. not sufficiently Russian, and too subtle to do justice to Stokowski’s version of the Khovanshchina fragment Mussorgsky’s coarser idiom. Indeed, since then there have transforms it into a moving, heart-breaking statement. His been numerous other orchestrations in search of a more own words, printed in the published score, say it best: Russian approach. Stokowski’s version is shorter than Ravel’s, because he eliminated two pictures, Tuileries and Of all the inspired music of Mussorgsky, this is one The Market Place at Limoges, presumably because he felt of the most eloquent in its intensity of expression. A they sounded too French, and/or he thought they were man is going to his execution. He has fought for actually written by Rimsky-Korsakov. There is little point freedom – but failed. We hear the harsh tolling of in comparing the value of the Ravel and Stokowski bells, the gradual unfolding of a dark and tragic orchestrations, as they both serve the work wonderfully, melody, with under-currents of deep agitated albeit in different ways. I sense that the Stokowski version tones, all painted with somber timbres and will gain more devotees as time goes by. Stokowski poignant harmonies. introduced it with the Philadelphians on 17th November 1939. In 1913 Toscanini conducted the U.S. première of the The two Tchaikovsky fragments become mini 8.557645 2 7 8.557645 557645 bk Stokowski US 14/06/2005 03:44pm Page 6 José Serebrier symphonic poems in Stokowski’s palette. Solitude is with the sound the conductor has imprinted in his ear, and Stokowski’s own title; the original title was Again, as the conductor’s ability to produce that same sound from any Multi-award-winning conductor and composer José Serebrier is one of the Before, Alone, Op. 73, No. 6, the final song from a set of Six orchestra. Almost every conductor has that ability. The most recorded classical artists today. He has received sixteen Grammy Romances, on poems by D.M. Rathaus, a student who had degree to which that produces a dramatic influence is nominations in recent years. When he was 21 years old, Leopold Stokowski sent his poems to Tchaikovsky, asking for advice. related, partially, to the sound that has become imprinted in hailed him as “the greatest master of orchestral balance”. After five years as Stokowski’s version reaches a pathos of great intensity in the conductor’s memory. It seems logical that if a conductor Stokowski’s Associate Conductor at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Serebrier just a few moments, and manages to express a wordless who has spent years directing the Vienna Philharmonic has accepted an invitation from George Szell to become Composer-in-Residence feeling of desperation and sadness, much more than the an encounter with a school orchestra, this group will soon of the Cleveland Orchestra. Szell discovered Serebrier when he won the Ford original song. In effect it becomes Stokowski’s own. He sound smooth and refined. While it can be argued that the Foundation American Conductors Competition (together with James Levine). uses one of his recurrent “tricks”, to have only the last students would sit up, concentrate, and do their best when Serebrier was music director of America’s oldest music festival, in stands of violins play in the opening and closing passages, confronted with a known personality, the change in the Worcester, Massachusetts, until he organized Festival Miami, and served as conjuring a distant, disembodied sound of mysterious actual sound quality they produce would be involuntary. It its artistic director for many years. In that capacity, he commissioned many quality. Stokowski gave the first performance of his would be a natural reaction to the conductor’s idea of sound, composers, including Elliot Carter’s String Quartet No. 4, and conducted arrangement in 1936 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. acquired after years of listening to a specific quality of many American and world premières. He has made international tours with Humoresque, from Deux morceuax, Op. 10, No. 2 for sound. This theory works in both extremes and also in the the Juilliard Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal piano, was written in 1872. The middle section is based on a present reality of music-making around the world. There Philharmonic Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestre de street song which Tchaikovsky heard in Nice during a was a time when orchestras had a distinctive quality that set Chambre National de Toulouse. His first recording, Charles Ives’s Fourth Mediterranean holiday. Rachmaninov used to play it as an them easily apart. These differences were partially the result Symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, won a Grammy encore, and Stravinsky used it in his ballet The Fairy’s Kiss. of conductors spending long decades with their orchestras. nomination. His recording of the Mendelssohn symphonies won the UK Stokowski’s own Traditional Slavic Christmas Music is But conductors were not the only decisive factors. Some Music Retailers Association Award for Best Orchestral Recording, and his based on Ippolitov-Ivanov’s In a Manger, which in turn is ensembles, such as the Philadelphia Orchestra, had very few series of Shostakovich’s Film Suites won the Deutsche Schallplatten Award based on a traditional Christmas hymn. Stokowski’s bare changes in personnel, and a vast majority of the musicians for Best Orchestral Recording. Soundstage magazine selected Serebrier’s orchestration, which he first performed in Philadelphia on had been trained by the same teachers, in the same school. recording of Scheherazade with the LPO as the Best Audiophile Recording.