DREAMS AND TALES: Mussorgsky · Scriabin
Michele Campanella piano
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition are often heard in orchestral arrangements, but it is in their original guise for the piano that we get closest to the composer’s extraordinary and colourful vision. From the noble ‘Promenade’ theme to the grotesquery of ‘Baba-Yaga’s Hut on Fowl’s Legs’ to the majestic ‘Great Gate of Kiev’, Mussorgsky and Campanella take us with them on this scintillating tour, painting in sound the images witnessed by the composer at that exhibition. Scriabin’s colourful visions were very real, a product of his synaesthesia combined with his ecstatic spirituality. We hear two relatively early works which anticipate elements of his later style: the seductive Sonata No. 3 and the rarely-heard Valse, Op. 38.
