This is a fascinating release, not only for the revelatory performances of versions of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain but the virtuosity of the Orchestra and Chorus of the Academy of Santa Cecilia, Rome, who tackle these scores with such aplomb. 

This release also showcases the links as well as the contrasts between the two composers featured – Modest Mussorgsky and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (who completed both Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov and Night on Bald Mountain as a labour of love to the memory of the gruff and feckless Mussorgsky after his premature death). 

Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Night on Bald Mountain remains by far the more popular, but it does not feature on this album. Instead, the program offers two different iterations of the work by Mussorgsky himself. The first, a purely orchestral version, was written in the 1860s. It took inspiration from a lost play, The Witch by Georgi Mengden, and portrayed a witches’ sabbath. Some years later, around 1880, Mussorgsky revised it, creating a work for orchestra, adult...