Music: Pop Go the Pictures

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Switched-on Bach, the burbling and tootling re-creations of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and other works on the Moog synthesizer, has become the best-selling "classical" record of all time (3 million copies sold worldwide to date). None of the subsequent sons of SOB (The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Moog Strikes Back) has ever managed to overtake the original, but the newest and most interesting challenger is Tokyo's Isao Tomita, 43. After a slow start last year, his RCA album Snowflakes are Dancing (electronic versions of Debussy piano pieces) has passed the 200,000 mark. Three months ago, RCA came out with Tomita's second album of synthesized sound: Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. It has already sold more than 100,000 copies, a success partly attributable to a mammoth marketing campaign by RCA. Last week the album was not only No. 1 on one classical chart but had also worked its way into the pop top 50 and even onto the jazz chart of the trade magazine Record World.

Poor old Mussorgsky: Rimsky-Korsakov doctored Boris Godunov almost beyond recognition, Stokowski mauled A Night on Bald Mountain, and now Tomita has repainted Pictures. It is a marvel that the original music has the strength to stand up to this kind of dilution, like a good Scotch to soda. Tomita's Pictures is no threat to Sviatoslav Richter's classic version of Mussorgsky's piano original, or the Toscanini interpretation of the expert Ravel orchestration. What Tomita does is pop art pure and simple. It is benevolent caricature, a funny-paper treatment of the classics for those who get nervous at the real thing.

Unlike so many of the funnies, Pictures is often funny. Listening to it on an RCA Quadradisc, one hears each of the first four notes of the opening "Promenade" from a different loudspeaker. Disconcerting, that. So, at first, is the fact that the sound is not Mussorgsky's piano or Ravel's trumpet, but one of human voices—or rather, canned choral sounds transmogrified by Tomita's Mellotron, an electronic keyboard device that plays prerecorded tapes. Things perk up considerably with the first picture, "The Gnome," a succession of subterranean squeaks and giggles that resemble a band of tipsy trolls frolicking beneath Frankenstein's castle. As for "The Old Castle," it sounds like a caravan of balalaika players pursuing an Arabian shawm virtuoso.

Slow Clock. The man responsible for all this is a mild and scholarly former art-history student. Inside his Tokyo apartment there are TV sets everywhere, James Brown or Elvis billowing from the kitchen radio, and a clock on the wall that appears to be five hours slow. "We like to think of it as being seven hours fast," says Tomita, long resigned to the incongruity of being an electronics master who cannot fix a clock.