A Night on Bare Mountain Slatkin

Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra celebrate Mussorgsky with the release of two of his most cherished works, 'Pictures at an Exhibition' and 'Night on a Bare Mountain' (performed here in Mussorgsky’s original version). Gergiev is at his finest conducting these paragons of Mussorgsky’s work, featured alongside which are the seldom heard 'Songs and Dances of Death', composed during the years 1875 to 1877 and left languishing unpublished during the composer’s lifetime. One of Mussorgsky’s most powerful compositions, each song deals with death in a poetic manner reflecting experiences not uncommon in 19th century Russia: child death, death in youth, drunken misadventure and war.

Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) was a Greek conductor who came to America in the 1930s and made many recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Like Wilhelm Furtwangler of Arturo Toscanini, Mitropoulos' height of popularity came just before the advent of modern sound technology, so that many of Mitropoulos' finest recordings are marred by distortion and background noises that may make those recordings practically un-listenable to some classical music enthusiasts (although the new Sony Mitropoulos set has advertised that most of those very rough recordings have been "remastered").

This fantastic debut album by American band was flawlessly produced by Ian McDonald (ex-King Crimson) and released in 1975 on Passport Records. Today it’s generally considered by many listeners as progressive rock masterpiece. All songs on that spacey album were very well developed with its moods variations, shifting rhythms, rich melodies, dynamic arrangements & plenty of acoustic/electric guitars and assorted keyboards interplay. Obviously, it’s easy to find similarities to the other progressive bands like Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, Yes, King Crimson or even Egg, but it just adds a unique flavor to this great album! This CD edition has been carefully remastered from original, analogue source and sounds better than ever!

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.

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.