Pictures of What?

The 2008/09 Beyond the Score series begins with Ravel’s famous orchestration of Mussorgsky’s mighty piano sequence, Pictures from an Exhibition. Complementing the CSO’s season theme, Echoes of Nations, we will explore the fascinations and contradictions of a cool and sophisticated 20th-century Frenchman orchestrating a work by a mid-19th-century Russian who was wild and strange and certainly neither cool nor sophisticated.