Rene Leibowitz, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – Moussorgsky: The Power Of The Orchestra: A Night On Bare Mountain / Pictures At An Exhibition (Ultra Tape)

Power is more than volume

The title promises a grand gesture. Yet The Power of the Orchestra becomes particularly interesting when the orchestra is holding something back: a single colour, a brief movement, the space before an entrance. The large eruptions have a history. Waiting only for those moments means missing much of what makes Mussorgsky’s music so vividly pictorial.

René Leibowitz and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra pair “A Night on Bare Mountain” with Pictures at an Exhibition. Recorded in London’s Kingsway Hall in 1962, with Kenneth Wilkinson engineering, the album has a specific recording environment behind its reputation. But it need not be approached as a test for a sound system. It is equally inviting as a sequence of contrasting musical states.

Specific pictures behind the great gate

Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition in 1874 after a memorial exhibition for his friend Viktor Hartmann. The piano work does not describe an entirely imaginary gallery. Drawings and designs provide its starting points, while the recurring Promenade brings the visitor into the sequence.

Those models are surprisingly varied. Gnomus relates to a grotesque nutcracker; the great gate of Kyiv derives from an architectural design that was never built. The monumental ending therefore does not simply portray a structure Mussorgsky could visit. Music gives the unbuilt project a presence it never acquired outside art. That is more intriguing than a general image of imposing Russian scenery.

Between the pictures, the Promenade is more than an attractive interlude. Somebody is looking, moving on and carrying an impression of what has just been seen. Ravel’s 1922 orchestration translates that piano world into changing instrumental colours. On a recording promising the orchestra’s power, contrast becomes a major part of the pleasure: the individual pictures cannot all be equally heavy, loud or monumental.

A deliberate four-side presentation

This edition: Ultra Tape, and what you need to play it

Analogue Productions issues this recording in its Ultra Tape series: a ¼-inch analogue tape running at 15 ips with IEC equalisation, in two-track (half-track) stereo. Each copy is made in real time from a copy of the original analogue master tape, transferred on an ATR-modified Ampex machine with flux magnetic heads, and it arrives in a custom slipcase.

Playing it needs a reel-to-reel machine that runs at 15 ips and reads two tracks. The format leaves out the steps a record takes between master tape and groove, which is the reason collectors reach for it.

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Musicians

Documented selection of participating musicians. Personnel may vary by track; this list does not claim to be complete.

• René LeibowitzConductor
• Royal Philharmonic OrchestraOrchestra