O.C. Music : New Route to Changed ‘Mountain’

One of the images I took away from the Disney film “Fantasia” as a kid was that of a huge, bat-winged devil perched at the top of a mountain. To the exciting music of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” the devil drew ghosts and skeletons out of swamps and jails and graveyards for a big nasty party. It was Halloween in motion.

But the music wasn’t really what Mussorgsky wrote, claims Daniel Lochrie, whose new version of the score will be heard for the first time at the Pacific Symphony concert in Costa Mesa today (the program, which also includes works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky, repeats Thursday).

Typically, Mussorgsky’s music became known through editions by others. His colleagues had considered some of his innovations too crude or bold and toned them down. Other works were left in such fragmentary form that they could not be performed.

“Fantasia” incorporates an edition by Rimsky-Korsakov (who similarly had revised the opera “Boris Gudonov”). The edition was further arranged for the film by conductor Leopold Stokowski.

“Rimsky changed notes and whole key areas,” Lochrie, 32, said during a recent phone interview from his home in Nashville, Tenn., where he plays clarinet with the Nashville Symphony. “He omitted two themes--the devil’s and also the church choir (at the end). He replaced development sections with added repetition. He toned down the orchestration in general. He toned down the harmonic language so there is less dissonance.”

Lochrie discovered all this when he was working on the piece for his doctoral dissertation at Ohio State University in 1992. “I hadn’t planned to finish my doctorate, to tell the truth. The last thing the clarinet world needs is another paper on mouthpiece literature. I was buying time until I could get an orchestra job.”

But as he began writing a paper on “Bald Mountain,” he discovered its complex history, “which created questions in my mind. I got interested in this topic, and that gave me a reason to finish the degree.”

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It all began around 1867 when Mussorgsky wrote an orchestral tone poem called “St. John’s Night on the Bare Mountain.” The work--which disappeared until the score was published in 1968--had not been performed, “a real sore spot” for Mussorgsky, Lochrie said. “He spoke highly of his own work in this case, which he rarely did. He completed the score on St. John’s Eve (the Russian Halloween, when the annual witches’ Sabbath would occur). He saw that as inspirational.”

Failing to get the work performed, he revised it in 1874 for an opera project with other composers, “Mlada,” but the project was abandoned. So he revised it again in 1880 as an insert to what would be his final opera, “Sorochinsky Fair”. But he only got as far as writing a version for piano four-hands and chorus.

He died a year later. Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrated “Night,” while other composers completed the opera from the sketches Mussorgsky left behind.

“People tended to take Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of things, which was not always correct,” Lochrie said. He noted that the difference between the first version and the “Fair” version “is extensive,” and that Rimsky didn’t have the benefit of hearing the first version, which didn’t surface until the late 1960s. Lochrie did.

“I decided to orchestrate the last version, using the first version as a model. To me, that seems the most obvious part of the whole thing. I’m just amazed it didn’t happen earlier.”

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Wouldn’t Mussorgsky’s ideas about orchestration have changed during the 13-year span? “That’s something that can’t be known,” Lochrie answered.

“I don’t think his general approach or philosophy toward orchestration ever changed. When he wrote (the first) ‘Bald Mountain,’ he bragged about the orchestration. He was concerned with the true representation of folk fantasy, what historians call ‘Russian Realism.’ Rimsky was far less concerned with that.”

Even so, there were places in the revision so different that Lochrie couldn’t rely on the earlier version. “In cases like that, I took similar passages from ‘Boris,’ from the orchestral passages in ‘Sorochinsky Fair’ and some similar things.

“There are two issues here, really. One is that this version of Mussorgsky’s notes--the actual notes--is never heard. It deserves a hearing. Before it’s rejected, it deserves to be heard. It’s hardly had a chance.

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“Secondly, as to which one you are going to like better in the end: As far as the notes are concerned, you’re going to like the notes of the Mussorgsky better. Rimsky should have left the notes intact. It would have been less of an affront.”

For all that, Lochrie’s version is not that different in length from Rimsky’s. “Rimsky has a lot more repetition in it,,” Lochrie said, “but he cut a couple of themes. (Mine) has more themes and less repetition. They end up being about the same length. The first 72 measures are the closest. After that, (mine) really gets to be quite different.”

* Carl St.Clair will conduct the Pacific Symphony in the premiere performances of Daniel Lochrie’s edition of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” today and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky also will be on the program. Robert McDuffie will be violin soloist. 8 p.m. $14 to $63. (714) 556-2787.