MUSIC / DANCE : Detour for Another ‘Night on Bald Mountain’

Music lovers of a certain generation--namely, mine--discovered Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” through the Disney film “Fantasia” (1940).

Disney’s horrific image of the blind-eyed, bat-winged devil Chernobog towering over the mountain as Mussorgsky’s music surges and whirls provides plenty of excitement (not to mention nightmare material) and captures the score wonderfully.

But the music isn’t really what Mussorgsky wrote, says Daniel Lochrie, whose version of the piece will be heard for the first time tonight at Pacific Symphony’s concert in Costa Mesa.

As was usual with the innovative, erratic, dipsomaniacal genius, most of Mussorgsky’s music became best known through the editions of others. Some of his innovations were considered too bold and were toned down; other works he left in fragmentary form.

“Fantasia” incorporates the traditional version of “Bald Mountain” edited by Rimsky-Korsakov, further arranged by Leopold Stokowski, who conducted it for the film.

“Rimsky changed notes and whole key areas,” Lochrie says.

“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 wanted to get back to the composer’s original ideas. In doing so, he found a complicated and tangled history, which emerged as his doctoral dissertation at Ohio State University in 1992.

“I hadn’t planned to finish my doctorate,” says Lochrie, clarinetist with the Nashville Symphony. “I was buying time until I could get an orchestra job. But I was doing a paper on ‘Bald Mountain.’ I discovered these problems, which created questions in my mind. I got interested in the topic, and that gave me a reason to finish the degree.”

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 him,” Lochrie says. “He spoke highly of his own work in this case, which he rarely did.”

Mussorgsky revised it in 1874 for an opera project, “Mlada,” which was abandoned, and 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. (The chorus, which came into play because this was an opera, “really is pretty secondary,” Lochrie says.) Mussorgsky died a year later. Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrated “Night,” while other composers completed the opera from sketches Mussorgsky left behind.

“People tended to take Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of things, which was not always correct,” Lochrie says. The difference between the first version and the “Fair” version is, Lochrie says, “extensive,” but Rimsky didn’t have the benefit of hearing the first version, which didn’t surface until the late ‘60s. Lochrie did.

Lochrie 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.”

There were places in the revision that were so different, however, that he couldn’t rely on the earlier version. “In cases like that, I took similar passages from ‘Boris (Gudunov),’ . . . ‘Sorochinsky Fair’ and some similar things.”

“Rimsky has a lot more repetition in it, but he cut a couple of themes. (My version) 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.”

* What: Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” played by the Pacific Symphony, conducted by Carl St.Clair. Works by Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev also are on the program. Robert McDuffie will be the soloist.

* When: Today, Dec. 8, at 8 p.m.

* Where: The Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

* Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Avenue exit north. Turn right from Bristol onto Town Center Drive.

* Wherewithal: $14 to $63.

* Where to call: (714) 556-2787.

MORE MUSIC AND DANCE:

William Hall will lead the Master Chorale of Orange County in “Reflections of Christmas” Saturday, Dec. 10, at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The audience will be asked to sing along on seasonal carols. (714) 556-2787.

Juan Talavera will present his flamenco music and dance troupe Friday and Saturday, Dec. 9, 10, 16 and 17, at 8:30 p.m. and Sunday, Dec. 18, at 4 p.m. at the Curtis Theatre, 1 Civic Center Circle, Brea. Guest dancers will include Yolanda Arroyo, Lourdes Rodriguez, Lilia Llorens and Pepa Sevilla. Paco Arroyo will be the guitarist; Antonio de Jerez and Jesus Montoyo will sing. (714) 990-7722.