Program Notes: Xian Conducts Pictures at an Exhibition

MICHAEL ABELS 
Delights and Dances 
BORN: October 8, 1962 
WORK COMPOSED: 2007 
WORLD PREMIERE: September 25, 2007, in The Sphinx Laureates Concert featuring the Harlem Quartet at Carnegie Hall in New York City. 

Much laureled contemporary Black composer Michael Abels has made quite the name for himself over the past several decades. He started playing piano at 4, composing at 8, and completed his first full orchestral work (and had it performed) by age 13. 

He gained widespread recognition in the 1990s for orchestral pieces like Global Warming (1991) and Frederick’s Fables (1996), though over the years, his orchestra catalog has expanded to encompass chamber, concerto, solo, ballet and opera works as well. In 2023, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his opera with Rihannon Giddens, Omar, which loosely follows the life of Omar ibn Said and is based on his 1831 autobiography, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar ibn Said. You very likely know of Abels from his scoring work, however; he’s created music for more than a dozen films and TV series, including Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Nope and Us, Star Wars: The Acolyte and The American Society of Magical Negroes, among many others.  

Delights and Dances was originally commissioned by the Sphinx Organization, which reached out to Abels to create a work celebrating its 10th year supporting diversity in concert music. The rousing 13-minute result was written for the Harlem Quartet, an ensemble of first-place laureates of the Sphinx Competition for outstanding young Black and Latino string players.  

According to Abels, “Delights and Dances showcases a quartet of string soloists in a kind of diptych of American musical genres, one regarded as ‘black’ and the other ‘white.’ The piece begins with a slow, lyrical introduction that grows from a cello solo into a duet with the viola, culminating in a gentle crescendo for the full quartet. The first major section is blues, which allows the soloists to flaunt their musical talents through a series of solos that are designed to sound improvised, although they are actually notated. The second half of the piece is a rousing bluegrass hoedown, once again featuring the quartet as they trade riffs back and forth (in a way that might recall ‘Dueling Banjos’), which culminates in a boisterous coda. It’s a piece that celebrates musicians playing together. I hope it fills you with joy.” 

Performances of Delights and Dances by the Seattle Symphony will feature a new quartet of Sphinx Soloists: violinists Rubén Rengel and Melissa White, violist Celia Hatton, and cellist and Seattle Symphony Artist in Focus Gabriel Cabezas. 

Leilani Polk © 2025 

ZOLTÁN KODÁLY 
Dances of Galánta 
BORN: December 16, 1882, in Kecskemét, Hungary 
DIED: March 6, 1967, in Budapest, Hungary 
COMPOSED: 1933 
WORLD PREMIERE: October 23, 1933, with the Budapest Philharmonic Society conducted by the composer.  
SEATTLE SYMPHONY HISTORY: First performed by the Symphony in 1956 with Milton Katims on the podium, Dances of Galánta wasn’t programmed again until two decades later, in 1976, under the baton of then-Music Director Rainer Miedél. 

During his childhood years in Galánta, Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) heard bands play countless Hungarian and Romani ditties, many of which remained fixed in his memory. From this vast reservoir of folk-inspired material, Kodály fashioned several works, including the five-section Dances of Galánta.  

Commissioned to create a work for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Society, Kodály took specific melodies from a volume of Hungarian dances published in Vienna a century earlier, and the result largely consists of variants on the ubiquitous slow-fast verbunkos style — which originated in the Austro-Hungarian army as a means to recruit young men to enlist. Kodály invested the dances with bold color and rhythmic élan. The music begins with a pensive introduction that sets up a nobly flowing main theme courtesy of the solo clarinet. Throughout the piece, this melody recurs frequently, serving as a rondo theme between contrasting episodes. A pair of intervening episodes led by flute and oboe, respectively, are quicker in tempo and lighter in mood. The second half of the Dances abandons the rondo format in a sequence of dance tunes that generally increase in tempo and abound in energetic syncopations. The emphatic ending is interrupted by a brief clarinet cadenza.  

Steven Lowe © 2018, revised 2025 

MODEST MUSSORGSKY 
Pictures at an Exhibition 
Orch. by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) 
BORN: March 21, 1839, in Karevo, Russia 
DIED: March 28, 1881, in Saint Petersburg 
WORK COMPOSED: 1874; orchestrated 1922 
WORLD PREMIERE: October 19, 1922, in Paris, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting. 

Modest Mussorgsky, who died the penniless scion of a noble family, came of age during a period of intellectual tension that pitted Slavophilia (an attitude that revered Eastern European folk culture) against Western artistic conventions. Mussorgsky and four other composers who embraced the Slavophilic mission — among them Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who would later publish the Pictures at an Exhibition score — became known as the Mighty Handful. Together, they pushed against Western music’s dominance of the concert hall, turning to Slavic popular melody, legends and fairy tales for thematic inspiration.  

Mussorgsky became an exemplar of this movement. Michael Russ calls him “the only true musical Populist” of his era, not only for his ideology but for his fascination with Slavic people’s everyday concerns and earthy imagination: Pictures at an Exhibition in particular evokes scenes of “work, fantasy, love, comedy, tragedy and death,” from the jostling of an oxcart to the frenzied capering of the witch Baba Yaga’s hut.   

Mussorgsky was inspired by artists in other domains who shared his preoccupation with Russianness. Mussorgsky’s friend, painter and architect Victor Hartmann, was feted for his use of Russian subjects and motifs. He died young of an aneurysm in 1873. Distraught, Mussorgsky praised his deceased comrade’s adherence to the “Russian style,” lamenting, “Poor orphaned Russian art!”   

The influential critic Vladimir Stasov, a mentor to both Hartmann and Mussorgsky, organized a commemorative display of more than 400 of the deceased artist’s paintings and drawings at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. Moved to creative fervor by the exhibition, Mussorgsky composed a ferociously difficult piano suite in three weeks. He dedicated the piece to Stasov — no doubt in recognition of his mentor’s role in the Academy exhibition, but also making the suite a monument to the Russian avant-garde aesthetic.   

Pictures at an Exhibition mostly eschews Western form to follow its own logic: 10 movements separated by Promenades, brief interludes meant to depict the composer walking from painting to painting. During Mussorgsky’s lifetime, the piano suite went underappreciated by his colleagues, according to Stasov. A score was published by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1886, five years after Mussorgsky’s early death, with Stasov providing notes on the art that inspired each movement.   

It was this version — with its smattering of errors and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “corrections” — that the French composer Maurice Ravel orchestrated in 1922 at the request of the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Though other composers have since orchestrated the original suite, Ravel’s remains the most popular adaptation for its inventive textures: shivery strings, majestic brass, chirping woodwinds.  

Pictures at an Exhibition opens with an oddly metered Promenade; with its regular rhythm and alternating 5/4- and 6/4-time signatures, it is both stately and off-kilter. In a letter to Stasov, Mussorgsky explained that he was mimicking the movement of his own ponderous gait. Abruptly, the music rushes into Gnomus, based on a design for a gnome-shaped nutcracker. Wild bursts of eighth notes and slower, staggering phrases emphasize the figure’s grotesquerie.   

A second, more subdued Promenade brings us with little fanfare to The Old Castle, whose original title was given in Italian, Il vecchio castello. Stasov describes the corresponding art briefly: “A medieval castle, in front of which a troubadour sings his song.” The mood is melancholic — and, one might say, not markedly Italian. A brassy Promenade moves us to Tuileries, a brief, playful scherzo evoking children’s squabbles in the famous Parisian garden.   

From here, without a transition section, Mussorgsky gives us a radical change in mood: Bydlo (“cattle” in Polish) depicts the rumble of a massive oxcart. A low, lumbering rhythm contrasts with a sad folk tune, which Ravel’s lush strings imbue with tragic depth.  

The next Promenade is in a minor key and feels more equivocal than the previous, yet its slightly sinister build-up is interrupted by chaotic rhythms in the woodwinds. The basis for Ballet of Chicks in their Shells was a costume design for the ballet Trilby of children dressed as eggs. Another abrupt transition takes us directly to Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle. This movement is based on two paintings of Polish Jews — one wealthy, one poor — from the town of Sandomir. Mussorgsky evokes Jewish melodies with two contrasting themes: one imposing, the other quiet and plaintively trilling.  

The next movement, The Marketplace at Limoges, swerves back to urban France for some bustle and gossip. Then, Mussorgsky moves us underground with yet another wild mood swing: crashing, doom-laden horns take us to the land of the dead, the Catacombæ (Sepulcrum romanum). The following movement, Cum mortis in lingua mortua (“with the dead, in a dead language”) is a sinister return to the Promenade theme.   

Toward the end of this dark Promenade, the music seems to be resolving into peaceful resignation. Yet the celebrated next movement opens with an exhilarating, rushing section marked Allegro con brio, feroce, summoning the forest witch Baba Yaga. The corresponding Hartmann artwork was actually a design for an ornate clock styled after Baba Yaga’s magical hut on chicken legs. Ingeniously, the movement’s A-B-A structure depicts both the fearsome witch and the rhythmic screech of a cuckoo clock.   

The Hut on Hen’s Legs ends on a rising chromatic scale that bursts into the final movement, The Great Gates of Kiev, based on Hartmann’s architectural design for a monument to Tsar Alexander II. Mussorgsky exalts an altered Promenade theme into a depiction of pomp and glory. Though Hartmann’s monument was never built, The Great Gates of Kiev memorializes the painter’s vision — and his devotion to Slavic folk culture — in a mood of elated grandeur.   

Joule K. Zelman © 2022, revised 2025