Pictures at an Exhibition: The Piano Concerto? Yes, folks, you heard right. Emile Naoumoff expands Mussorgsky’s score with tacky transitions, vulgar cadenzas, and lumpy orchestrations. He essentially transforms what originally was a stark and dignified gallery into the Liberace Museum. The opening piano cadenza pads the Promenade theme with chime chords that don’t evoke Mother Russia’s bells of old, but rather the Avon Lady’s signature ding dong. Both Gnomus and the Unhatched Chicks Ballet feature audience-baiting piano glissandos, and Naoumoff’s tinkly piano countermelodies throughout The Old Castle redefine elevator music for the next century. In The Market Place at Limoges, Naoumoff cleverly bounces the music back and forth between piano and orchestra, but the cumulative effect is ruined by an unimaginative, totally superfluous piano cadenza inserted midway. But the slow, sustained orchestral chords in Catacombae and Con Mortuis, as well as Baba Yaga’s middle section, provide convincing padding for gentle, Messiaen-like piano musings.
Too bad that sluggish, enervated orchestral playing hampers the music’s energetic moments. Listen, for instance, to the thick strings at the start of the Great Gate at Kiev: it’s like Vaughan Williams submerged in quicksand. In all, if you must have your Mussorgsky mucked up, mangled, and morphed, stick with Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. As for Naoumoff’s original piano and orchestra composition Méditation, imagine the Adagio of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony merged with Leonard Bernstein’s self-conscious use of lyrical dissonance in Kaddish and Chichester Psalms, and you’ll get the gist of it. I’m not sure if this release qualifies as a party record, but it probably will entice your guests to go home earlier than planned.
