"Pictures from an Exhibition"

If you're my age, that title might bring to mind this classic 1971 album cover from Emerson, Lake and Palmer. But the original Pictures from an Exhibition is a virtuoso piano suite that was written by Modest Mussorgsky in 1874. We heard it at the Seattle Symphony yesterday along with some other good stuff, but the famous Pictures was the highlight of the afternoon. Mussorgsky wrote it as a piano composition but it's been transcribed for full orchestra, with Ravel's arrangement being the most performed. The excellent guest conductor was Roberto Abbado, who comes from a family of maestros including Claudio Abbado, his uncle.

Mussorgsky, age 18

Mussorgsky, a bit later

Mussorgsky lived only 42 years and died miserably in a hospital a few days after this famous portrait was made by Ilya Repins. Let's just say Mussorgsky enjoyed his vodka and leave it at that. Like other alcoholic artistic geniuses, he managed to be incredibly productive during his short life-- he composed the Night on Bare Mountain, the opera Boris Godunov and dozens of other works. Probably all with a hangover.

But his most famous piece is Pictures from an Exhibition, written as a remembrance to the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann. They were close friends, and when Hartmann died suddenly in 1873 Mussorgsky was devastated. An exhibition of over 400 of his paintings and watercolors inspired Mussorgsky to pay his own tribute by writing a series of piano pieces based on the pictures. He completed it in only three weeks at the same time he was putting the finishing touches on a couple of major operas.

Viktor Hartmann
1834-1873

Mussorgsky's music depicts an imaginary tour of the art collection, and the ten movements allude to specific pictures. Each is completely different, but tied together by a prelude or promenade during which you can imagine walking through the exhibition. Today most of the pictures from the Hartman exhibition are lost, but musicologists claim to have identified several. Many of them were made while Hartmann was traveling abroad in Poland and France.

Being more visually inclined than musically, I would have enjoyed looking at the Hartmann pictures while daydreaming through the music. Of course there wasn't enough room in the program to reproduce them, but I found several later on the good old Internet. Here's a few examples:

The Catacombs of Rome

The Poor Jew, Warsaw

Sketch of Little Chicks in Their Shells
from Ballet Trilby

The Great Gate of Kiev

The look of fall

A new (old) Ivan Doig novel and a new velvet pillow from Marshalls.  I like to read on the sofa with the afternoon light at my back, and yes, have been known to take a little nap there after lunch.

I went on a fun little shopping spree at Marshalls yesterday. The tired summer stuff was gone and the store freshly stocked with fall merchandise and kitchen stuff for Halloween and Thanksgiving.  All too soon everything morphs into Christmas, but for a few weeks, there's the cozy feel of fall in the stores.

We finished the PBS Ken Burns Country Music series last night-- all 16 hours of it. It was long but not a boring moment. As a teenager growing up in Colorado, I was crazy about the Beatles, folk music and the British bands. But country music records were the undercurrent, played in jukeboxes, on the radio, and even at our dances. I'm not big on the modern sound of country, but always liked the old classic songs. Watching the Ken Burns special made me realize why.  Because they are good and true.

Speaking of fall, it was school open house night at Liberty Bell Elementary in the Methow Valley. Here's first grader Maya, showing off her illustrated story. It looks very interesting. I'll have her translate when we see them in October.

And another sure sign of seasons changing, our Seattle Symphony series starts this Sunday with Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Dvořák’s cello concerto. We're looking forward to getting caught up with Betsy and Paul, and seeing Mary, our young music-loving friend sitting behind us in the 5th row.

Have a good weekend, dear friends and family.

Weekend potpourri

Right around the vernal equinox, the evening light slants through the front windows at the perfect angle to illuminate the dust and crumbs under the table. Of course I have to jump up to grab a Swiffer, the greatest invention in the history of housewives.  Soon it will be too dark to notice much dust-- until the next equinox. This is called Spring and Fall housekeeping.

On Saturday morning, my ukulele group performed at the new Aegis assisted-living facility a few blocks from here. Oh my, was it ever fancy and elegant, with huge common spaces and small bedrooms starting at $4,000 a month, gourmet food included, wine extra.  But can you imagine living in a 5-star hotel, or permanently on a giant cruise ship? Our dusty, homey cottage looked pretty good when I got home.

Along with a Wagner overture and the Dvorak Cello Concerto, we heard "Pictures from an Exhibition" at the Symphony yesterday, an audience favorite.  Back in February 2012, I wrote a long blog post about the piece and matched the actual pictures with Mussorgsky's music. I must have felt especially ambitious (or bored) that morning:  CLICK HERE for the link. Anyway, we enjoyed the concert and seeing our friends.

A busy first week of October week ahead. I have an appointment with a new tax accountant this morning (I'd rather go to the dentist) and a Medicare specialist tomorrow (ditto.)  On Wednesday though, a better dishwasher arrives. Yea!  But say a little prayer they can shoehorn it in that tiny space.

That's about all the news fit to print on this cold Monday morning.
So long, September.

Art in the rain

This past weekend was another cool washout in Seattle. The sun came out for just an hour on Saturday afternoon, and John rushed outside to block the raccoon's porch tunnel with some heavy lumber he bought at Home Depot. So their stinky house under our house is now off-limits, unless they care to do some serious digging. While he worked on that project, I took luscious pictures with my new digital camera and ran back and forth to the computer to see how they turned out.

On Sunday morning, after eating a high carb breakfast (hey, it's cold!) we left the house early and drove downtown to visit the Seattle and Frye Art Museums. Under the gray blanket of clouds, downtown was almost deserted except for a few chilly looking tourists who actually packed shorts and flip flops for their Seattle summer vacation. Ha!

Looking Down Yosemite Valley
Albert Bierstadt

The current Seattle Art Museum exhibition is called Beauty and Bounty, American Art in the Age of Exploration. We had the gallery almost to ourselves, and those big landscapes sparkled in ornate gold frames under perfect museum lighting. We liked the paintings, but it made you think about the rough wilderness camps where they were created. And how did the artists manage to get them back to civilization?

Leaving SAM, we drove a few blocks to the Frye Art Museum on Capitol Hill. Of course we were hungry again and had lunch with a peaceful indoor view of the drenched courtyard and a big round sculpture we always call the "mossy rock." My new camera has a "gourmet mode" for food shots, so I gave it a try:


The Frye was showing an unusual exhibit called Gabriel von Max: Be-tailed Cousins and Phantasms of the Soul. Max (1840–1915) was an artist, spiritualist and Darwinist and a remarkable 19th century German character. He was a highly educated naturalist fascinated with evolution, and over his lifetime collected a museum full of objects in the fields of anthropology and zoology. At the same time he created paintings with Christian and mythological subjects with themes of religion, death, spiritualism and the afterlife.

Outside the Arena
(A pensive and pretty Christian waiting to be martyred)

Portrait of a "Seer" having a vision

Religious angst and ecstasy

Toward the end of his life, his focus moved toward science. He collected pet monkeys, and his portraits of them became artistic metaphors for human behavior and personality. A fascinating and complex man.

And a good way for us to use up a rainy Sunday.

The Anjou Bible

I ran across some fascinating Gothic miniatures on an art blog I follow. They are from the Anjou Bible, created at the Royal Court of Naples in the turbulent 14th century, a time of power, corruption and intrigue.

For almost 500 years, the manuscript fell into oblivion until it finally surfaced in Belgium.  It's currently being conserved and digitized at the Theology Faculty's Library of the University of Leuven.  High-resolution pictures and zoom make it possible for scholars to study the tiniest details in the strange symbolism.

After the exhibition, this gem will be re-bound and returned to the safety of the dark strongroom for many years to come.  But the digitized version is online and the mighty Amazon sells a reproduction book for $109.