Musical Sunday

Pictures at an Exhibition is considered an outstanding example of program music and one of the most famous classical works ever. However, the piece gained fame not in its original piano version, but through the orchestral arrangement by Maurice Ravel, 41 years after Mussorgsky’s death. Indeed, a central quality of the cycle is its immensely vivid tonal language, which elicits entirely new color effects from the piano. Moreover, the relationship of the individual pieces to their originals is interesting, for not all of the images that are musically set into light here have survived. So a few questions remain open…

Two enthusiasts of music have their say here: Marcus Imbsweiler publishes novels, also stories about composers; Timo Jouko Herrmann is a composer, violinist and guest conductor of the Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra.