Pictures
at an Exhibition.

While the context of the 1922 commission from the Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky is well known — he had asked Ravel to provide a complete orchestration (the one produced by Mikhail Tushmalov in 1891, based on the Rimsky-Korsakov version of the piano score, was incomplete) of the Ten Pieces for Piano by Modest Moussorgsky (1874) — as is the first performance at the Opéra de Paris as part of the Concerts Koussevitzky series on 19 October 1922, the "editorial" history of this brilliant and highly imaginative instrumentation remains little known or neglected.

It was only in 1929 that the score and its performance material — until then only offered for rental to orchestras, which explains the very small number of scores currently preserved — were engraved and published by the Édition russe de Musique, Koussevitzky's own publishing house.

Until that date, the orchestral score and separate parts remained in manuscript form in the sole possession of the Russian conductor-editor, who conducted directly from the manuscript. On this manuscript in Ravel's ink — dated May 1922 for the completion of the writing — one can see the conductor's blue pencil strokes as well as various corrections made during the long years preceding the first engraving of the score, or the very first recording of the work in Boston in October 1930.

Modifications of instrumentation, successive corrections of mistakes, dynamics, phrasings — and even of the narrative structure — were made across the 98 handwritten pages by the Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra: retouches that were added to the few corrections requested by the French composer after the Paris première.

In view of the graphic evolution of the score with its first commercial printing produced in Paris, the sale of the Édition russe de Musique and its acquisition by a British publisher, it was important to return to this first 1929 edition — while reflecting on the "piano" materials available when Ravel, a great connoisseur of the Russian repertoire, produced this orchestration.

Thus, this new 2019 edition is established according to the orchestral manuscript (1922), Moussorgsky's manuscript (1874), S. Koussevitzky's first parts, the printed 1929 score (original version Édition russe de Musique, Gabriel Pierné's copy) and the various Rimsky-Korsakov piano editions (Bessel, Peters, etc.) available in the 1920s.