While Pictures at an Exhibition is best known by Maurice Ravel’s orchestration, Modest Mussgorsky’s original score for solo piano is equally impressive and forms the basis for this arrangement for Cello Ensemble. Nearly the entire piece is included (omitting one interior promenade and the following two pictures). The work totals around 28 minutes as a full concert piece, and individual sections can be selected for shorter performances.

Varied cello techniques bring depth to this orchestration. Extensive pizzicato is used in single parts, doubling bowed passages, and in full accompaniment voicing. Octave doubling from the piano version is applied selectively for emphasis and to fill out lines in the extreme upper register. Double stops occur frequently, especially in the interior parts, to fill out block chords from the original piano voicing. The full range of the cello is employed.

This arrangement is tailored to ensembles with one to three cellists per part. Advanced quartets can omit the few divisi sections. Advanced-intermediate ensembles can opt to split the double stops and trade off some sections to reduce the difficulty. Groups can also select certain movements to learn sequentially based on difficulty; the recordings below feature some of the easier sections. The parts PDF is formatted to print double-sided with optimized page turns. It can also be read as a PDF in two-page view with separate cover page.

Movement Listing

• A. Promenade
• 1. The Gnome
• B. Promenade
• 2. The Old Castle
• C. Promenade
• 3. Tuileries [Garden] (Children’s Quarrel after Games)
• 4. Cattle
• D. Promenade
• 7. Limoges – The Market (The Great News)
• 8. Catacombs (Roman Tomb) – With the Dead in a Dead Language
• 9. The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga)
• 10. The Great Gate of Kyiv