Pictures at an Exhibition / Prelude to Khovanshchina / Night on the Bare Mountain / etc

"recorded live in the Musikvereinsaal in Vienna...fast, brilliant movements dazzlingly well played, and with the speed bringing an edge-of-seat feeling from perils just avoided, something not usually conveyed in a studio performance." (Gramophone)

The great interpreter of Russian music and the mighty Vienna Philharmonic join forces in four of Mussorgsky's best-loved orchestral showpieces.
Valery Gergiev's 2001 release of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring received overwhelming critical acclaim...
"Almost frightening in its intensity . . . Gergiev's heavy-metal interpretation of Stravinsky's Rite plays those yawps, yelps, thuds and thumps with raw savagery and Slavic swagger." The New York Times

Continuing his definitive recordings of the greatest Russian music, Maestro Gergiev now joins the Wiener Philharmoniker in four of Mussorgsky's most popular orchestral pieces, all best known in arrangements by other composers.

Mussorgsky's best-known orchestral work is, surely, Pictures at an Exhibition, though it was written as a suite for piano and only orchestrated (by the French master orchestrator Maurice Ravel) after Mussorgsky's death.

The spectacular Night on the Bare Mountain is also hugely popular in a version by another composer, Mussorgsky's fellow-Russian Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

The serene prelude to Mussorgsky's epic Russian historical opera Khovanshchina is here performed in the version by Shostakovich.

The least well known of the four works is the jolly folktune Gopak, Liadov's orchestral arrangement of rousing music by Mussorgsky for an opera based on Gogol's short story Sorochintsy Fair.

SACD represents the highest quality sound source available today and goes right to the depths of human hearing and beyond. You will hear the music as it originally sounded in the studio or concert, an effect which will quite simply blow you away!

As per other SACDs in the Decca/Philips catalogue, this release has the following features:
*It is a Hybrid Disc = SACD Surround, SACD Stereo and CD Stereo (ie. will play on all CD players).