A Night on the Bald Mountain

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (Russian: Модест Петрович Мусоргский,21 March [O.S. 9 March] 1839 – 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1881)was a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five". He was an innovator of Russian music in the romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music. Many of his works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other nationalist themes. Such works include the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. For many years Mussorgsky's works were mainly known in versions revised or completed by other composers. Many of his most important compositions have recently come into their own in their original forms, and some of the original scores are now also available. [source from Wikipedia]

This work is created based on the Russian folk legend by Mussorgsky, which describes the scene of the reveling dancing of the evil spirits in the mountains at midnight. In 1898, The Musical Times proclaimed it is "as hideous a thing as we have ever heard... an orgy of ugliness and an abomination. May we never hear it again!" Although the critics at that time were so crue and severe, Mussorgsky won the public's reverberation by ingeniously creating the picturesque, colorful and vivid theme and the richly changeful rhythm.