Keith Emerson was probably the most technically accomplished keyboard player rock ever saw, and he loved to show off his chops by covering the classics. For The Nice, his band before ELP, he scored rock arrangements of pieces by composers from Sibelius to Bach to Dave Brubeck. So nobody was surprised in 1971 when his still-new supergroup decided to release an entire LP of their rock treatment of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” — or that the album reached No. 10 on the US charts without benefit of a hit single.
The album was recorded live at Newcastle City Hall because Emerson wanted to use the venue’s pipe organ. To get the Musician Union’s permission he had to promise not to stick knives between the keys, a frequent stunt dating back to his Nice days.
Mussorgsky composed his suite of piano pieces in 1874, inspired by a posthumous exhibition of works by his friend, the Russian architect and painter Viktor Hartmann, who died the year before of an aneurysm at just 39 years old. The Kiev gate in question was Hartmann’s design for a city gate that was never actually built. Greg Lake provided the suitably ponderous lyrics.
The ELP LP had one piece that wasn’t by Mussorgsky: “Nut Rocker” was an instrumental adaption of Tchaikovsky that had been a No. 1 hit in the UK in 1962 by B. Bumble and the Stingers. ELP released it as the single from the album, but it only reached No. 70.
