Mussorgsky and Prokofiev – Steven Osborne

There is a species of pianist who treats Pictures from an Exhibition as an excuse for spectacle — thundering octaves, cathedral pedaling, the works. Steven Osborne is not that pianist.

What strikes you first is the quiet. The opening “Promenade” arrives without ceremony, Mussorgsky’s stumping, ungainly gait rendered with an almost conversational plainness. No swagger, no grandiosity imposed from outside. Some will miss the extra weight Ashkenazy brings to this same passage; Osborne dispatches it in a brisk 1:17 against Ashkenazy’s more spacious 1:24, and I confess I occasionally wanted him to loiter a bit longer at Hartmann’s door before walking through it. But the tradeoff pays for itself across the cycle’s fifteen further minutes. This is a pianist who trusts the text.

The text, in this case, is a curious document to begin with — a piano score that spent decades being treated as a rough sketch awaiting orchestral completion. Ravel did the honors most famously, though Stokowski, Ashkenazy himself, and a dozen lesser hands also had a go. Mussorgsky’s original piano writing is often clumsy by conservatory standards, hence generations of “improvers” tidying up his voice-leading, thickening his sonorities, smoothing what should remain rough. Osborne resists all temptation to polish. His “Bydlo” plods with real physical weight, the ox-cart’s wheels seeming to catch on stones you can practically hear underfoot, and he never lets the crescendo bloom prematurely. It arrives, inexorably, exactly when Mussorgsky wants it to. Contrast this with Pletnev’s notorious Virgin Classics account, which reimagines the piece as a Horowitz vehicle, tacking on octaves nowhere in the score and rewriting the ending altogether. Interesting as a curiosity, perhaps, but hardly Mussorgsky. Osborne has no interest in improving on genius.

The lighter numbers are where his touch really tells. “Tuileries” chatters with the bright inconsequence of children squabbling in a garden: light wrists, minimal pedal, every grace note articulated rather than blurred. “The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks” is a marvel of comic timing, the staccato bursts genuinely funny rather than merely fast. “Limoges” scampers along with gossipy urgency, market-women trading insults in sixteenth notes. And then “Baba Yaga,” vehement, near-savage, the kind of playing that makes you check the piano lid hasn’t come loose, pivots straight into a “Great Gate of Kiev” of genuine majesty, even if Osborne’s bells ring a shade less thunderously than Ashkenazy’s. A small quibble. The sense of a single journey rather than a suite of postcards is beautifully sustained.

The Prokofiev fillings are, if anything, even more persuasive. Sarcasms, op. 17, is early Prokofiev at his most deliberately abrasive: bitonal collisions, sardonic grins, music that seems to enjoy being unlikable. Osborne relishes the ugliness without overplaying it; the fourth piece’s climactic dissonance lands with real bite, not mere loudness. Visions fugitives, op. 22, is trickier repertoire to sustain across twenty pieces and nearly twenty minutes. Prokofiev himself, and later Richter, showed how easily these miniatures can seem merely episodic. Osborne finds the thread. Each vision is fully characterized, some barely a breath, others acidly witty, yet the whole never fragments. Few pianists since Richter have made this cycle feel so inevitable.

What’s remarkable is how completely Osborne’s artistry disappears into service of the music. Hyperion’s engineering is close and warm without being claustrophobic. David Fanning’s booklet essay notes, rightly, that “Pictures from an Exhibition” is the more faithful rendering of Mussorgsky’s title than the ubiquitous “at.”

This won’t displace every favorite on your shelf. Richter’s live Sofia Pictures still carries a demonic charge nobody has matched, and Ashkenazy’s reading remains a shrewd middle path between fidelity and flair. But Osborne’s disc earns its place among them: honest, superbly voiced, unshowy in the best sense. A record to live with, not merely to admire once and shelve.