Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky
Series
9. Ballet of the unhatched chicks
76" X 53 1/2"
Acrylic & Oil on Canvas
private collection
Listen
Ballet of the unhatched chicks Explained
With Permission: 2024 Canadian National Brass Project, Recorded at St. Anne's Church, Toronto, ON Aug 29 - Sept 2, 2016 canadiannationalbrassproject.com
Narration by: Sam Rosenthal & Michelle Piller
Narration by: Sam Rosenthal & Michelle Piller
Viktor Hartmann’s design was originally created for the ballet Trilby, adapted from Charles Nodier’s tale of a mischievous Scottish house fairy. Hartmann’s sketch dressed children as half-hatched chicks, a whimsical conceit that Modest Mussorgsky carried into sound through sprightly scherzando. Short phrases, high-register peeps, sudden pauses, and playful repeats give the music its chirring, fluttering energy, hopping from moment to moment.
Paula Arciniega relocates the scene to a rookery on the brink of motion. The canvas bursts with shells splitting, wings stretching, and figures teetering into life. The energy is exuberant but never simple. Perturbed birds and precarious eggs signal that growth brings friction as well as delight. Each hatch becomes a miniature drama of tension, rupture, and release.
Within the larger structure of the series, the eggs extend the promenade’s refrain of circles carried forward. What once appeared as a single sphere now multiplies into many, scattered across branches like notes on a stave.
A small turquoise orb glimpsed in Promenade IV reappears here as a hatchery of beats, rhythm made visible. Theatre and habitat merge, so that comedy, innocence, and becoming register as both staged spectacle and lived renewal
Paula Arciniega relocates the scene to a rookery on the brink of motion. The canvas bursts with shells splitting, wings stretching, and figures teetering into life. The energy is exuberant but never simple. Perturbed birds and precarious eggs signal that growth brings friction as well as delight. Each hatch becomes a miniature drama of tension, rupture, and release.
Within the larger structure of the series, the eggs extend the promenade’s refrain of circles carried forward. What once appeared as a single sphere now multiplies into many, scattered across branches like notes on a stave.
A small turquoise orb glimpsed in Promenade IV reappears here as a hatchery of beats, rhythm made visible. Theatre and habitat merge, so that comedy, innocence, and becoming register as both staged spectacle and lived renewal
When I painted this, I thought about the joy of first breath, the small flurries that tumble forward as life breaks open. Alongside delight there is fragility, as the shell must give way and each crack carries risk. These eggs echo the promenade’s spheres, circles of time and rhythm that are delicate yet full of possibility, holding both the comic theatre of childhood and the truth that every beginning is wonder entwined with struggle.– Paula Arciniega
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