Opera
Minus the bear
by Ian Dando
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION, by organist Martin Setchell and painter Philip Trusttum, Christchurch Town Hall
It would be hard to find another classic that proliferates so many arrangements as Pictures. This new one brings the total to 27.
For most, it means Ravel’s landmark 1922 orchestral arrangement. This indicates a diet deficiency in the original 1874 piano version with its heavy chordal writing. Mussorgsky wrote it for a Russian bear rather than 10 human fingers. In short, it’s unpianistic. It was Martin Setchell’s aim to make it “organistic” and invest its vibrant cameos of Russian folklore and street scenes with maximum colour.
The Town Hall’s new Rieger pipe organ is renowned for its multitude of crisply voiced colours. No other organist knows its potential more intimately than Setchell. He channelled the registrations deftly through the manuals and pedals with as many as four simultaneous colours counterpointing each other. The massive block chords in The Great Gate of Kiev and Catacombs billowed out with a cumulative thunder impossible on piano.
Articulation is the only quality where piano has a slight head-start over organ. It’s crisper with staccatos (in Tuileries) and sudden chordal cut-offs. Otherwise, it’s all plus-plus for organ, particularly in Bydlo, with its wooden ox-cart lumbering lugubriously through muddy paths. By emphasising bass and pedals, Setchell turned it into an impressively heavy plod just as it should be. This is Russia in the raw.
In quality and quantity, Philip Trusttum’s large 3m x 2m acrylic canvases made him an equal partner. His depiction of the two Jews in “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle” typifies his boldly juxtaposed colours painted on patterns of sharp angles and points. His art is rich in symbolism. For him, bold blue vertical lines symbolise the rich, innovative and overbearing Goldenberg as against thinner brown horizontal lines for the poor wheedling Schmuyle.
The titles of each Mussorgsky vignette are often fragmented into single letters and placed in each painting as a basis for its structure. Next comes the content, sometimes from diverse books such as the trio of Aztec, black African pictures and a dress pattern from Vogue all transformed into Catacombs.
Six were displayed at their best in the foyer, several more were fanned out on stage during Setchell’s first half of Bach, Langlais and others. Finally, came 50 or so projected on screen. But Trusttum’s pictures are not dependent on Mussorgsky; their vigour and freshness give them a life of their own, best savoured in a more leisurely timeframe as a follow-up showing in Christchurch’s upbeat new city gallery.
