MUSSORGSKY: ‘PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION’

Professor Gustavo Romero, pianist

Thursday 30 January 7.30 pm COURSE FEES R175; Staff and students R150

VENUE Erin Hall, 8 Erin Road, Rondebosch

In nineteenth-century Russia, Modest Mussorgsky and his contemporaries rejected the influence of the German composers and sought to create a musical tradition that would be purely Russian. In the kaleidoscopic movements of ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, each based on visual artwork, the power and directness of Mussorgsky’s non-Western European musical language, from his incantation of fantastic creatures and comic flights of fancy to the monumental tone painting of the ‘Great Gate at Kiev’, can be seen.

‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ is a piano suite in ten movements, written in 1874. It is a musical depiction of a tour of an exhibition of works by architect and painter Viktor Hartmann, put on at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, following his sudden death the previous year. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual work, some of which are lost.

Join Professor Romero as he discusses and performs ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’.

TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/performance.aspx?itemid=1554781776