Musorgsky and His Circle: A Russian Musical Adventure

Less than 200 years ago, there was no definitively Russian style of musical composition; by the 1860s, a handful of daring, untrained composers known as the Moguchaya Kuchka (“Mighty Little Heap”), including the brooding genius Modest Musorgsky, had collaboratively invented the New Russian school of classical music. Though their technical proficiency was constantly called into question, Musorgsky and his compatriots (among them Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov) determinedly created music untouched by outside (i.e., Western) influences, choosing to remain independent from conventional wisdom. Walsh, who in Stravinsky wrote about another great Russian composer, meticulously details the absorbing lives of these idiosyncratic Russians—their hypocrisies, internal and external rivalries—all with a careful eye trained on the qualities that made the Kuchka’s music so revolutionary. While Walsh, a former Cardiff music professor, writes with a technical proficiency, his goal—to produce a history of the New Russians that is “both scholarly and readable”—falls shy of the mark. Sadly, his tone is dryly academic, and the narrative confusingly jumps back and forth in time. That said, toward the last third of the book, Walsh finally picks up the pace of the narrative. (Dec.)