Pictures at an Exhibition

In Autumn 2020, OrchLab worked with groups from Bramley Hill Centre (Garwood Foundation) and St Cecilia’s (Leonard Cheshire) on a project inspired by Pictures at an Exhibition, an piece of music by Modest Mussorgsky.

Mussorgsky (1839–1881) was a prominent Russian composer who was very interested in creating music that had a uniquely ‘Russian’ sound. He had a friend called Viktor Hartmann who was an artist, and Mussorgsky composed Pictures at an Exhibition inspired by Hartmann’s pictures. The piece was originally written for piano, but is now commonly heard performed by an orchestra in a version arranged by another famous composer, Maurice Ravel.

In our OrchLab project, we were inspired by Mussorgsky’s composing method of using pictures to make music, so we created pieces based on pictures and Mussorgsky’s music. We even made artworks for our own ‘musical gallery’.

We hope you enjoy the short film we produced of our own version of Pictures at an Exhibition.