William Green peeks inside the artist’s studio to observe musicians who paint musical pictures.
As we mark 150 years since the composition of Mussorgsky’s iconic Pictures at an Exhibition – and near Auckland Philharmonia’s 17 October concert featuring said piece – it’s interesting to speculate where artinspired music began. A Byzantine monk chanting his response to a picture of a saint? An Egyptian twanging on a lyre after seeing an image of Horus? Perhaps a pair of far-distant ancestors gazing at a cave drawing then making their feelings known on rudimentary musical instruments? The list of composers inspired by paintings is long, ranging from Liszt, Debussy, Respighi and Saint-Saëns to Rautavaara, Dutilleux and Sondheim. Stravinsky’s A Rake’s Progress is based on paintings and engravings by William Hogarth. Even John Cage’s 4’33” was stimulated by a canvas, although admittedly a very blank one.
In this country, we have Rita Angus’s influence on Douglas Lilburn (whose own electronic music in turn influenced visual artists like Michael Shepherd). Anthony Ritchie has written music inspired by Frances Hodgkins, Philip Claremont and Grahame Sydney. Janet Jennings has made a specialty of it, with the solo piano works Pictures at the Waikato Museum and Aotearoa Pictures framed next to Twelve Colours: Homage to Paul Klee, which in 2023 was given its premiere by the Ākarana Piano Quartet, a group composed of Auckland Philharmonia musicians.
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition hangs highest, though, with its gallery stroll immortalising the life and work of the composer’s dear friend, Viktor Hartmann. Its first outing left the Russian’s musical colleagues scratching their heads in bewilderment, leading the composer himself to suspect that he’d gone too far. Mussorgsky’s music often has a wild and untamed edge – it’s one reason his friends felt the need to tidy his scores after his early death. Nevertheless, Mussorgsky’s experimental set of piano pieces has inspired a staggering list of orchestrators. It’s a tribute to his genius that there have been nearly a dozen new orchestrations in the 21st century alone. However, the Ravel orchestration, which Auckland Philharmonia plays in October, stands head and shoulders above all others – how could it not, in the hands of arguably the greatest master of orchestral colour? In a strange twist of musical evolution, virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz concocted a piano version of the work from Ravel’s orchestration rather than the original Mussorgsky piano score – a tribute, this time, to Ravel’s genius.
Less known than Mussorgsky’s Pictures is Bohuslav Martinů’s The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca, which opens Auckland Phil’s concert. Unlike the Mussorgsky set, which was written just a few years after the Hartmann paintings were completed, Martinů’s music finds its source in frescoes painted in the Italian city of Arezzo 500 years earlier. The threemovement work is based on The History of the True Cross, a cycle of paintings adorning the walls of the Basilica of San Francesco, which the composer visited in 1952. Martinů’s work is less programmatic than Mussorgsky’s, attempting to represent not what the younger composer sees, but how the frescoes make him feel.
“I tried to express in musical terms that kind of solemnly immobile calm and semi-darkness,” Martinů said, “that palette of colours creating an atmosphere filled with delicate, peaceful, and moving poetry.”
The result is sometimes mysterious, sometimes majestic, but always evocative.
The New Zealand Herald Premier Series: Pictures at an Exhibition
7.30pm, Thursday 17 October
Auckland Town Hall
Conductor Shiyeon Sung
Piano Jean-Efflam Bavouzet
Martinů The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca
Bartók Piano Concerto No.2
Mussorgsky (orch. Ravel) Pictures at an Exhibition