The Capture of Kars (Взятие Карса)
Category: Wind Band > Classics
Duration: 5' 45"
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A work with many titles! This comes from the difficulty of translating 'torzhestvenniy' which means both solemn and triumphal. Although Mussorgsky made his own orchestration of an early version of this march, it was revisited by others including Rimsky-Korsakov, and in the communist era Pavel Lamm. Neither of these agrees exactly with the piano edition, so the present arrangement chooses the best features of all three. The capture of the Ottoman fortress of Kars in 1877 was the decisive victory of the last Russo-Turkish war, and Mussorgsky's celebration of it is genuinely patriotic.