A Night On Bald Mountain

Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, telling sumptuous stories, and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, graphically chilling, are two of the most popular works in the Russian repertoire. Programming them together, as Music Director of the Orchestra and Chorus dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Sir Antonio Pappano reminds us of the links between the two composers. At the same time he provides a rare opportunity to hear both of Mussorgsky’s versions of Night on Bald Mountain – one for orchestra and one for orchestra and vocal forces.

The NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo is a Japanese broadcast orchestra based in Tokyo. The orchestra gives concerts in several venues, including the NHK Hall, Suntory Hall, and the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall…

Tchaikovsky’s most overtly nationalistic symphony, his 2nd known as the ‘Little Russian’ uses folk songs from the Ukraine, and is the nearest the composer came to the musical and cultural ideals proposed by ‘The Mighty Handful’. This group of composers – Borodin, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui and Mussorgsky rejected the Western influences on Russian culture, and looked to the music, folklore and history of Mother Russia for inspiration. Mussorgsky, probably the most naturally gifted of this group composed A Night on the Bare Mountain in 1867, and the original version heard here was not published until 1968. It is a striking work, quite shocking in it’s modernity, and a world away from Rimsky’s better known re-composition of the piece.

Carlo Maria Giulini was born in Barletta, Southern Italy in May 1914 with what appears to have been an instinctive love of music. As the town band rehearsed he could be seen peering through the ironwork of the balcony of his parents’ home, immovable and intent. The itinerant fiddlers who roamed the countryside during the lean years of the First World War also caught his ear. In 1919, the family moved to the South Tyrol, where the five-year-old Carlo asked his parents for "one of those things the street musicians play". Signor Giulini acquired a three-quarter size violin, setting in train a process which would take his son from private lessons with a kindly nun to violin studies with Remy Principe at Rome’s Academy of St Cecilia at the age of 16.

These well known pieces are presented in superb sound. Carlo Ponti Jr. is the son of Carlo Ponti Sr. and Sophia Loren and is a regular conductor of the Russian National Orchestra.

These are very solid performances from Slatkin, but the recording is the star here. The Elite recordings from Aubort and Nickrenz are simply some of the finest analogue (or any) recordings of orchestras in real acoustic spaces ever made. And Mobile Fidelity, as always, has done them justice, in full. The results are startlingly realistic sounding in timbre, coherence, transparency and staging.