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The WHRB juts broadcasted the Esa-Pekka Salonen’s debut with San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Esa-Pekka Salone is musical director of Las Angeles and he brought, among other things, his own composition “Insomnia”. The Insomnia was very nicely performed, in fact very-very nicely! Ironically the nice performance of the Insomnia, from my point of view was due to squashed sound of orchestra’s bass and the drum section completely imbedded into the inner-sound of mid night hallucinations.

However in the first section the very same orchestra tried to run over the Mussorgsky “Night on Bald Mountain”. It was kind of desirers as the dense and condensed bass of the Insomnia-tunes SFO (Wager's tubas?) was completely wrong for the Mussorgsky’s work . However, the big big big however….

The San Francisco Symphony this time played the original Mussorgsky score, not the Rimsky-Korsakov alternation. No mater how “organish” the SFO sounded but still… what a phenomenal music the original score is!!!

I do not know what king Spirits of Darkness and Witches and the other reps of the dark forces Mussorgsky meant but I am laughing to healing this music like crazy. I find the original scores of the Mussorgsky “Night on Bald Mountain” extremely happy and gloriously joyful. It is not the celebratory joyful. It is not in the “Master and Margarita’s” ways, not in the Faust, answered by Mephistopheles: "'I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” I feel that “Night on Bald Mountain” is superbly happy itself with any references to any reasoning. The more “hard” and “menacing” the “Night on Bald Mountain” tries to be the more reassuringly cheerful it sounds to me. Mussorgsky does it always. In his “Hat of Baba Yaga” Mussorgsky try to be “dark” but I find it incredibly blissful, not to say mockeshly cheerful music.

Listen the Mussorgsky’s original score and you might discover a new sounding of in the “Dark Forces”

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

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