Ballet of the Unhatched Chickens

In 2003 the charity, Paintings in Hospitals, invited 15 artists to produce work in in response to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Written as a group of pieces for piano in 1874, the pictures that provided Mussorgsky’s original inspiration were mainly watercolours, painted by his friend Victor Hartman, who had died the previous year. 

For this interpretation Tom Phillips chose Mussorgsky’s fifth movement, Ballet of the Unhatched Chickens. Mussorgsky had responded to Hartman’s painting of dancers in costume from the ballet Trilby, as fledgling chicks emerging from the shell. Trilby had first been presented in 1870 by the Ballet of the Imperial Bolshoi Theatre, in Moscow.