Mussorgsky's Khovanschina

'Khovanschina' is the second opera of Modest Mussorgsky.

This is my orchestration of the opera's beautiful prelude. It is also known as 'Dawn on the Moskva River'.

Movement One of Enrique Granados' "12 Danzaz Espanolas"

Part one of my effort to orchestrate Granados' exotic Spanish dances.

Public Service Announcement

For this film, we had to make a public service announcement about a topic relevant to the present day.

This was one of my earliest films and is one that I am proud of.

Aesthetic Film

For this film, we had to make a very short film about a very mundane action that is visually beautiful. 

The purpose was to learn mise-en-scene which is film terminology for how a shot appears. I completed an array of different versions of this film. This one is my favorite. 

Modest Mussorgsky - St John's Night on Bald Mountain

No piece is more intense, nor is any piece more silly than Modest Mussorgsky's tone poem St John's Night on Bald Mountain.

Written between 1867 and 1880, it is one of Mussorgsky's most celebrated works and his only major symphonic poem. 

Similarly to his opera Boris Godunov and piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, Bald Mountain has an incredibly complex history with half a dozen different versions being played around the world. The original version, completed in 1867, was heavily criticized by Mussorgsky's friend and mentor Mily Balakirev who scribbled in notes such as "complete rubbish" or "I send this music to the devil" in the margins. Despite the push-back, Mussorgsky remained enthusiastic about the work, inserting sections of the music into a number of his other works, most famously the opera buffa The Fair at Sorochynsti. 

After the composer's death in 1886, Mussorgsky's colleague Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov set out to prepare his manuscripts for publication. He reconstructed Bald Mountain into the piece that we all know today; however, most musicologists consider this an original work of Rimsky-Korsakov in homage to Mussorgsky. 

It is Rimsky-Korsakov's version that this transcription is based upon. Before I compiled my arrangement, I first studied the version by Konstanin Chernov; the most famous piano transcription of the work. In my arrangement I combined the sections of Chernov's arrangement I considered to be the most successful with my own embellishments in order to create a truly "pianistic" version of the piece.