Welcome to another Episode of Fascinating Spaces with the Erie Philharmonic.

I'm Daniel Meyer, music director of the Philharmonic.

And it is my pleasure to take a stroll with you together through an incredible piece of music by Modest Mussorgsky called pictures at an exhibition originally written in 1874.

This multi movement work is a virtuoso showpiece for any great pianist.

The second composer name that you'll need to know is that of Frenchman Maurice Ra..

Conductor Serge Koussevitzky knew that Maurice Ravel had an expertise in turning piano pieces into brilliant works for the symphony orchestra.

He encouraged Ravel to look into bringing Mussorgsky's piano suite to life as a work for orchestra.

Ravel took up Koussevitzky Challenge in 1922, expanding Mussorgsky's music into a full blown orchestral suite.

That suite is what you will hear the musicians of the Erie Philharmonic perform in this program.

Ravel understood that each sound picture Mussorgsky composed was an opportunity to paint with the colors of the orchestra by using individual hues, like the solo saxophone in the Old Castle, or the chirping woodwind family in the Ballet of Unmatched Chicks in Their Shells.

The massive chorale for the brass section, ushering in the Great Gate of Kiev of Ravel, brought a palette of unusual diversity.

To create this orchestral arrangement.

In this program, you will hear the musicians of the Erie Philharmonic perform in our new rehearsal hall at the Warner Theater.

You will also hear some of the movements of the piano work originally composed by Mussorgsky, played by pianist Sean Duggan.

We will also get a chance to stroll through our own Erie Art Museum on East Fifth Street.

Learn about the collection and how the art museum strives each and every day to maintain and showcase a vibrant, vital visual arts scene in our community.

We will also introduce you to Erie based art historian Matthew Levy, who will offer another perspective on the impact of art in our lives.

Let's get started with the music.

Mussorgsky was good friends with the painter and illustrator Viktor Hartmann, and as an homage to his friend Mussorgsky, created an entire suite of music inspired by Hartmann's art.

We will play the opening promenade, and then we will play the grim and menacing Gnomus.

With so many different visual impressions created in Hartmann's art, Mussorgsky needed some way to create structure and thread each movement together.

He came up with the ingenious idea of composing promenade music, music that keeps coming back in different variations to remind us that we are on a stroll through a gallery, looking at very different works of art.

I'm pleased to introduce pianist Father Sean Duggan, who's on faculty at SUNY Fredonia.

He'll play one of those Promenade movements from the original version for solo piano.

Here's Father Duggan with his own impressions of what Mussorgsky did with this extraordinary piece.

Well, hi, I'm father Sean Duggan.

I'm a professor of piano at SUNY Fredonia.

Well, when I was a kid, I was watching Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, and one of those concerts featured pictures and an exhibition.

I always wanted to play that piece because I knew well, Bernstein had mentioned that Mussorgsky originally wrote it for piano.

So, I guess when I was an early teenager, I got the score to it and, pretty much off and on.

I've been playing it at various times in my life.

And so when the Erie Philharmonic, was scheduled to, do the orchestral version, and then I found out that, well, people are also interested in the piano version.

When it was first when, pictures was first published, it was published in an edition that Rimsky-Korsakov came out with, and he changed a few things from Mussorgsky's original manuscript.

Rimsky-Korsakov liked to do that.

He thought he was improving things.

And so when Ravel went to orchestra it, he orchestrated it off of Rimsky-Korsakov's edition.

So there are many things that are in the orchestration that come from Rimsky-Korsakov's Edition that are different from, one example, for example is.

[Plays Piano] At the end of Samuel Goldenberg, whereas Rimsky-Korsakov went and that's the way Ravel did it with the orchestra.

Well, it's certainly a suite.

And what holds all the movements together is the promenade theme, which at first, anyway, links the pictures together, portraying the, the person who is Mussorgsky himself at the Exhibition of Viktor Hartmann's drawings walking from one to the next.

And so very often the promenade, either, has the same mood as the preceding picture or it anticipates the next picture, and then also Mussorgsky's own musical language holds it together.

He has his own way with harmonic progressions, the harmonies that he uses and the melodies that he uses, which, often are typically Russian sounding.

So I think all of those things combined, leading up to the Grand climax at the end of the Great Gate, is really what unifies the whole thing.

Let's return to the Ravel Orchestra.

The next movements include a Promenade, the Old Castle, another Promenade, and Tuileries, a depiction of little kids playing and mocking each other in a Parisian park.

Erie is a rich environment for expe.. We have a superb resource for art.

Right downtown in the Erie Art Museum.

Originally named the Art Club of Erie in 1898.

The Erie Art Museum has evolved over its history, and it now boasts a multitude of offerings and artworks available to the public.

All curated by a talented team in the five building complex we now know on East Fifth Street.

Here's Melanie Vadzemnieks to tell us more.

Hi, I'm Melanie Vadzemnieks, and I'm the development director at the Erie Art Museum.

The Erie Art Museum has been around since 1898.

It's a very old, institution in Erie.

And it started with a group of women who got together and called themselves the Art Club of Erie.

And they were intent on making sure that people who were doing art in Erie were recognized, and that there would be a way to collect and preserve the work that they were doing.

This museum is a gem to the community of Erie.

We really like to showcase local artists.

But then, the the spring Art show, that happens every year.

We just celebrated, 101st spring show opening.

And, this past year, I believe we had 455 pieces submitted, and the jurors selected 75 pieces.

And that's it's a wonderful show for people to come out and see every year, because it's a real, true representation of not just the great talent that we have here in this area, but the wide variety of art forms that are being done all throughout Erie in the area.

I think that inspiration is what what awakens within you when you see a work of art.

And for every person that can be a little bit different.

And yet there is also this lovely thing where you can take people from completely, completely different backgrounds with nothing in common with each other, and you can put them both in front of the same piece of artwork.

And often that's where they can find their commonalities.

And that's how people come to know what kind of works they're drawn to.

What is it that they like?

What is it that they're not real crazy about?

And there's no right answers.

There's no wrong answers.

It's individual, and we all come to a piece of artwork with our own histories and biases and experiences behind us.

And so it can say different things to us.

But art says something to almost everyone.

And so for Mussorgsky, in writing pictures and an exhibition, he was saying musically what he was feeling internally when he was looking at these different pieces of .. And it's just a lovely example of how art does inspire art.

Now let's hear the Philharmonic play Bidlo from the orchestral version depicting a lumbering oxcart.

After this piece, you'll hear principal tuba player Ken Heinlein discussing his role in the piece.

My name is Ken Heinlein, and I am the principal tuba of the Erie Philharmonic.

When I started playing music, I started on the euphonium.

I was not a tuba sized person.

And so it's very common in school band programs for you to start on the smaller instrument.

I've always loved playing euphonium.

I transitioned to tuba.

So the tuba.

This is kind of the largest member of the brass family, the biggest version of a brass instrument for how physics plays right now.

but the euphonium is basically an octave shorter.

So the tuba as the contrabass member of the brass family, is somewhere around 16 to 18ft long.

the euphonium being an octave higher, is only nine feet long.

So it's a much smaller instrument and plays the octave above where the contrabass tuba does.

There's an interesting thing happening in pictures at an exhibition where you have this piano piece that has been arranged by Ravel, and Ravel is writing for the instruments that existed at his time.

And so, as a consequence, many of those instruments are the same, but some are slightly different.

The instruments on the stage are.

This collection from ancient antiquity up until the very recent past.

So some instruments like the bassoons, the oboes, these are ancient instruments with double reeds, but the brass is the youngest family, and the tuba literally couldn't exist until valves were invented somewhere around 1830 1840.

So the youngest member of that entire orchestra is the tuba.

And being a soloist is not the traditional role of the tuba player.

I'm used to supporting my colleagues, to listening very carefully for us, kind of building a unified vision of what the sound is.

So to suddenly be the person responsible for leading a musical idea in that way, is fairly rare for the tuba player to do.

And I feel like some of the magic of of performance is that we communicate with each other with something that isn't quite words.

And so we end up in this place where I can communicate directly from my feelings to the listener's feelings.

And so it's important for me to know exactly what is the emotion leading into this.

And there's something so, so plaintive and so sad.

Sad and and just distant.

about this solo.

It clearly it comes in at a distance and kind of crescendos up.

It gains intensity because there is almost a panoramic scene, as the oxcart comes from the distance and arrives at your presence and then leaves at the end.

So it's almost like we have this picture in time, and we see the song being sung as it passes by us.

So there's an emotional journey to in being a soloist, to put myself in that spot and kind of feel those things and then create that solo as it comes.

Now we'll hear another promenade, followed by the Ballet of the Unattached Chicks in their Shells.

Our region is fertile ground for creative artists.

We are fortunate enough to have some significant visual artists and craftspeople who make their homes in Erie County.

Now, I'd like to introduce you to Matthew Levy, an associate professor at Penn Behrend will talk a little bit about the role art plays throughout our region.

He'll also talk about the relationship between visual artists and musicians, focusing on Modest Mussorgsky and Viktor Hartmann.

So my name is Matthew Levy.

I'm an associate professor of art history at Penn State Behrend.

and I'll be speaking with you about the relationship between visual art and music.

You know, I gave this talk about about the relationship between art and music.

There are excerpts from pictures at an exhibition that were performed on piano.

And I just thought it was perfect that that event could happen in this space at the Erie Art Museum, which has long been a home for both, you know, visual art and music.

and so I thought it was just this was the perfect home for that kind of a thing.

And I think visual artists have always been interested in music.

There's something about music that the way that it can, just kind of create feeling in the listener.

without really any prior knowledge.

Right.

.. for a piece of music to, like, just spark a feeling in you.

Right.

And .. just because art often does, visual art often requires, at least historically speaking, like, you know, an understanding of some kind of prior narrative or whatever story is being represented, whereas whereas music can just going to be felt.

And so I think a lot of times artists are kind of aspire to that condition of just like art that can be like appreciated by feeling.

whereas on the flip side, like musicians have have often turned to artists as a way of kind of like helping them kind of think outside the box, come up with new approaches to, to narrative, to thi.. of, of artistic structures, maybe that, kind of sidestep, some of the kind of rigid, kind of training they might have had to going back to like their, you know, their own school days.

So, yeah, there's, there's definitely a rich kind of back and forth between the two.

There's a recurring, motif in Pictures where there's a Promenade where it's they can meet.

The sound of the music is meant to, kind of imitate the feeling of walking around, picture to picture.

And so the music, like the work, the musical piece kind of creates that feeling of, like, walking through a gallery.

So today, I think I a great example.

I mean, so, Hartmann the artist that the work is that that picture is, is based off of there's not much known about him.

And, and there aren't that many pictures of his remaining.

And so, you know, so Pictures at an Exhibition is, in a way, in its musical interpretation of some of these paintings.

It's the only lasting, you know, remnants of it that we have, you know, if any, on any given week, whether it's gallery night or the Art After Dark, events, there are frequently opportunities to look at visual art, hear music, and maybe kind of connect those dots in your own mind.

So it's, it was it was nic..

I can feeling coming in the air tonight Fighters coming in I'll never turn to the Dark Side So be it.

Boba Fett!

Where?

I am a Jedi Like my father before me Let's return now to Father Duggan.

I hope you find it fascinating to compare the sound impression the original piano version must have made on its first audiences, particularly in comparison to what Ravel later did with the whole orchestra.

In this piece, titled Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle, you'll hear a stark contrast between the haughty, well-fed, rich man Goldenberg and the jittery, fragile Schmuyle Now, here's the orchestral version of that same music.

Now imagine a bustling market scene from the center of Paris called Limoges.

Then we'll continue with a movement titled Catacombs.

Catacombs makes use of stark contrasts of register.

That is, the highs and lows of the orchestra and a volume, massive blasts and calm, hovering chords.

We'll move right into the last version of the promenade music..

It's set in a minor key and has a very dark and mysterious character, and it has its own title With the Dead in a Dead Language.

Well we have nearly completed our performance of this brilliant suite.

But before we finish, I would like to take this opportunity to t.. the Erie Art Museum, professors Sean Duggan and Matthew Levy, as well as the staff of the Warner Theater and Mega Media Factory.

Next, you'll hear the final two movements of Pictures at an Exhibition.

The first is titled Baba Yaga.

Then we'll transition into the majestic Great Gate of Kiev, which features a glorious presentation of the original Promenade.

Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of Fascinating Spaces with the Erie Philharmonic.

We hope you've enjoyed visiting another fascinating space through music.

If you haven't already, make sure you visit the Erie Art Museum, the Warner Theater, and any of our region's other fascinating spaces.

We cannot wait to see you again for another great performance at the Warner Theater or throughout our community.

We'll see you next time at the Erie Philharmonic.