Leopold Stokowski's Arrangement: Night On Bald Mountain (1940)
Millions of 20th-century listeners owe their initial acquaintance with Mussorgsky's tone-poem to the use within Walt Disney's 1940 film Fantasia of a specially produced version made by Leopold Stokowski. Stokowski stated that he based it on the Rimsky-Korsakov arrangement in form and content (though notably without the 'fanfare' that marks the entrance of the black god Chernobog), but on Mussorgsky's original in orchestration. However, like Rimsky-Korsakov himself, Stokowski had no copy of the original tone poem from 1867, so he did what he felt Mussorgsky would have done, being familiar to some extent with Mussorgsky's style, having conducted the U.S. premiere of the original version of Boris Godunov in 1929 and having subsequently produced a symphonic synthesis of Boris for concert purposes. Stokowski went on to produce an even more drastic adaptation of Night on Bald Mountain for concert performance. The Stokowski arrangements are only rarely heard today, Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration being the concert favorite, and the one most often programmed.
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Famous quotes containing the word bald:
“The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)