• 01. Promenade 01:53
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 02. The Gnome 02:25
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 03. Promenade 00:58
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 04. The Old Castle 04:49
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 05. Promenade 00:34
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 06. Tuileries / Children at Play 01:03
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 07. Cattle 02:46
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 08. Promenade 00:45
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 09. Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks 01:12
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 10. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle 02:24
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 11. The Market at Limoges, The Great News 01:27
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 12. The Catacombs, Roman sepulcher 04:22
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 13. The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba-Yaga) 03:29
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

• 14. The Bogatyr Gates (in the Capital in Kyiv) 06:18
Music by Modest Mussorgsky

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Pictures at an Exhibition, A Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann, is a suite in ten movements originally composed for piano by Modest Mussorgsky in 1874. The work is Mussorgsky's most famous piano composition, but it has also become known through several orchestrations and arrangements, with this version by Ravel being the most popular one. It was in 1870 that Mussorgsky met artist and architect Viktor Hartmann. Both men were devoted to the cause of an intrinsically Russian art and quickly became friends. Hartmann died from an aneurysm in 1873. The sudden loss of the artist, aged only 39, shook Mussorgsky along with others in Russia's art world. Influential critic Vladimir Stasov helped organize an exhibition of over 400 Hartmann works in the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg in February and March 1874. Mussorgsky lent works from his personal collection to the exhibit and viewed the show in person. Fired by the experience, he composed Pictures at an Exhibition in six weeks. The music depicts an imaginary tour of an art collection. Titles of individual movements allude to works by Hartmann; Mussorgsky used Hartmann as a working title during the work's composition. He described the experience to Stasov in June 1874: "Hartmann is seething as Boris was. Sounds and ideas float in the air and my scribbling can hardly keep pace with them." Mussorgsky, himself a sufferer of delirium tremens and complications from alcoholism, would die seven years later at the age of forty-two. Mussorgsky based his musical material on drawings and watercolors by Hartmann produced mostly during the artist's travels abroad. Locales include Poland, France and Italy; the final movement depicts an architectural design for the capital city of Ukraine, Kyiv. Today most of the pictures from the Hartmann exhibit are lost, making it impossible to be sure in many cases which Hartmann works Mussorgsky had in mind. Mussorgsky links the suite's movements in a way that depicts the viewer's own progress through the exhibition. Two "Promenade" movements stand as portals to the suite's main sections. Their regular pace and irregular meter depicts the act of walking. As with most of Mussorgsky's works, Pictures at an Exhibition has a complicated publication history. Although composed very rapidly (during June 2-22, 1874), the work did not appear in print until 1886 (five years after the composer's death), when an edition by the composer's great friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was published. This publication, moreover, was not a completely accurate representation of Mussorgsky's score, but presented an edited and revised text that had been reworked to a certain amount, as well as containing a substantial number of errors and misreadings. Only in 1931, more than half a century after the work's composition, was Pictures at an Exhibition published in a scholarly edition in agreement with the composer's manuscript. In 1940, the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola published an important critical edition of Mussorgsky's work with extensive commentary. Mussorgsky's hand-written manuscript was published in facsimile in 1975.

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