Pictures At An Exhibition

We wanted to do this last October and couldn't and hope to down the road (stay tuned!) here was the idea:
Upon seeing the great extent of pictures Rick had captured, -- intense and varied, of life on the farm, of the skies he loved to be in, and of people performing -- Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition reminded us of a suitable celebration of Rick as part of the memorial service at his planetarium. We would line the hallways of the physics and astronomy department where he worked with as many pictures as physically possible and space music would play while his friends strolled the halls.

That was the same inspiration for the composition Pictures at an Exhibition – A Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann, composed by Modeste Mussorgsky in 1874, and orchestrated by Maurice Ravel in 1922. "One of the most powerful of all creative urges is to memorialize. The results can range from the trivial statues of mounted generals that clutter our parks to the awe of the Pyramids. Yet, perhaps the most powerful creations are those which try to overcome a grievous personal loss by immortalizing the evanescent.
"Modeste Mussorgsky produced his Pictures at an Exhibition to perpetuate the memory of a friend. In the process, he created a monument far more massive and lasting than his subject."1
The piece was inspired by the untimely death of a close companion of Mussorgsky. Victor Hartmann, an architect and occasional painter, 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 a year later. Mussorgsky lent works from his personal collection to the exhibit and viewed the show in person. His visit to that show became the most famous gallery stroll of all time and fired by the experience, he composed Pictures at an Exhibition in six weeks. This masterful piano suite illustrates ten of Hartmann's images, with a recurring ``Promenade`` theme to illustrate the viewer's progress from painting to painting.

There wasn't time or resources enough to create this display shortly after Rick's death but hopefully it can be accomplished in the coming year. A coffee-table oriented book of Rick's work is also in the planning stages. Anyone who wishes to donate to the project or be kept up to date on any exhibit via e-mail, drop us an email or use the Donate button.

sources:
1. address: http://www.classicalnotes.net/classics/
title: Classical Notes - Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Classical Classics, Peter Gutmann.mht
2002 by Peter Gutmann
2. address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_at_an_Exhibition
title: Pictures at an Exhibition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2008
3. address: http://lasr.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/prognotes/mussorgsky/pictures.html
title: Mussorgsky/Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition
1999 by Geoff Kuenning