having never heard/seen Khovanshchina (all I knew of Mussorgsky was Night on Bald Mountain!), your essay inspired me to take a long listen (via Spotify - how easily we can do this now… find and hear most anything, immediately… not so helpful to artists, given the shamefully meagre renumeration for each stream, but so helpful for the rest of us) - really enjoyed it, the whole ‘mess’!
What a lovely thing to hear as a critic! The Claudio Abbado recording is my favorite (and uses the orchestration pairing I saw in Salzburg). It is actually in many ways a very tight opera in terms of structure, and the mess comes from Mussorgsky leaving it behind unorchestrated at the time of his death.
having never heard/seen Khovanshchina (all I knew of Mussorgsky was Night on Bald Mountain!), your essay inspired me to take a long listen (via Spotify - how easily we can do this now… find and hear most anything, immediately… not so helpful to artists, given the shamefully meagre renumeration for each stream, but so helpful for the rest of us) - really enjoyed it, the whole ‘mess’!
What a lovely thing to hear as a critic! The Claudio Abbado recording is my favorite (and uses the orchestration pairing I saw in Salzburg). It is actually in many ways a very tight opera in terms of structure, and the mess comes from Mussorgsky leaving it behind unorchestrated at the time of his death.
that is the performance I listened to, and yes, it is tight
and also was inspired to read you LRB review