Promenade - Gnomus - Promenade - Il Vecchio Castello - Promenade - Tuileries (Children Quarrelling After Play) - Bydlo - Promenade - Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells - "Samuel" Goldenberg and "Schmuÿle" - Limoges, the Market Place - Catacombae (Sepulcrum Romanum) - Con Mortuis in Lingua Mortua - The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba-Yaga) - The Great Gate of Kiev

The impetus to play Mussorgsky's Pictures on two harpsichords arose from a well-lubricated gathering after a duo concert in which Gerald Ranck and I probably played the Couperin Duets and the Bach C major Concerto. Or it might have been after we "re-lived" the famous Handel-Scarlatti competition at the Metropolitan Museum (he was Handel). We had been friends since the 1960s, fellow students of Sylvia Marlowe and frequent collaborators, most notably in the duel scene of Milos Forman's Valmont. At that party, as I recall, he said "we need another piece to play", and I said "How about Beethoven's Ninth?" and he said "How about Pictures at an Exhibition?" His idea was the better one and you can hear the result of two quite different harpsichords dealing with a quite new orchestrational challenge. We tried to capture a Russian chant style in the various Promenades, the requisite humor in the Ballet of the Chicks, and as much noise as we could conjure up for Baba-Yaga and The Great Gate of Kiev. The demands of the latter prompted us to use our new technique of playing inside the harpsichord. Special thanks to Richard Taruskin for affording us insight about the Samuel-Schmuÿle duet, that the reason for Mussorsgky's simultaneous combination of the two motives - the pompous one and the whimpering one - was to indicate that these two qualities reveal different aspects of the same person, that underneath every pompous braggart is a whining complainer. This sort of person, of course, exists in all ethnicities, as do the gossipers in the marketplace, the quarreling children and the wicked gnome.