Pictures at an Exhibition

Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition in only twenty days during the spring of 1874, in memory of his friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann. The piano suite’s vivid imagery soon invited other musicians to imagine it anew. Many arrangements followed, with Ravel’s orchestration becoming the best known. Across these transformations, the work remains a musical walk through a gallery: memory, image and movement held together by an imagination powerful enough to survive every change of colour.