ELPirates
ELPirates was founded by three musicians in 2004. The members played together in the Hungarian progrock band ’You and I’ previously. The name, ELPirates came from the combination of the short version of Emerson Lake and Palmer (ELP) and Pirates (one of the greatest titles of ELP). The first and basic idea of the trio was to put the original ELP Pictures at an Exhibition on stage again, keeping it in its original form. Later the repertoire was widened by more ELP numbers.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer
The ELP was founded sometime in 1969, when The Nice (with Keith Emerson) and the King Crimson (with Greg Lake) held gigs together. Carl Palmer joined the two in April 1970. Their first album, with the title ’Emerson, Lake & Palmer’ was released the same year and still is one of the milestones of the progressive rock era. They had already played Pictures at an Exhibition even those times, and recorded it in the City Hall of New Castle. After the great success of another album (Tarkus – 1971), the Pictures album was finally released in 1972, and became a multi-platinum album quite shortly.
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
One of the pioneers of the musical realism, founder of the Russian realist music and musical traditional drama, besides Wagner and Verdi, he was one of the greatest and most outstanding characters of the 19th century. Despite his poor education in music, his talent made him extraorinarily original and unique. Altough he was often qualified as an amateur composer, he could see clearly which direction the music of the era was developing. He wrote the piano-piece ’Pictures at an Exhibition’ in 1874, as a memory of his lost friend, the painter Victor Hartman. The colorful pieces are linked with the Promenade theme, which is meant to express the composer’s feelings whilst walking from one picture to the other. The composition has became widely popular and known with the orchestration of Ravel.
Pictures at an Exhibition
Pictures at an Exhibition (or Pictures from an Exhibition; Russian: Карти́нки с вы́ставки) is a famous suite of 15 musical pieces, composed by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky in 1874. Mussorgsky wrote the work for piano, but it is probably better known in the form of various orchestrations and arrangements that have been produced by other musicians and composers (see below). Mussorgsky composed the work in commemoration of his friend, the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann (Виктор Гартман), who was only 39 when he died in 1873; the original title for the suite was Hartmann.
It was probably in 1870 and through the highly influential critic Vladimir Stasov that Mussorgsky had met Hartmann, whose devotion to the cause of an intrinsically Russian art must have made him a congenial spirit. It was at Stasov's instigation that a posthumous exhibition of over 400 of the artist's works was mounted in the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, in February and March 1874, and Pictures at an Exhibition, composed a few months later, takes the form of an imaginary musical tour around such a collection. As the pictorial basis for his musical 'exhibition', Mussorgsky mostly selected drawings and watercolours that Hartmann had produced during his travels abroad; oddly enough, only three of the ten pictures represented in the music actually appeared in the 1874 Hartmann exhibition (These are: 'Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks', 'The Hut on Fowl's Legs' (Baba Yaga)', and 'The Bohatyr Gate (at Kiev, the Ancient Capital)'). Sadly, we cannot in all cases be certain which Hartmann work Mussorgsky was alluding to, because not all the paintings and drawings have survived.
