Musical Selfies: Ravel, Mussorgsky and Verdi...Without Makeup!

My Facebook feed has been dotted in recent day with the latest social media craze.

For a good cause, female friends have been posting photographs of themselves without makeup.

Some actually look better that way, in my opinion (I know, nobody asked).

One can surely do the same in music.

Because often the famous versions of particular works are fleshed-out from sparser orchestrations, or chamber works, even piano sketches.

So, how do these works fare in what I hereby dub "musical selfies without makeup?"

I am, incidentally, indebted for some of these to friends on Facebook (appropriately enough)...

Ravel's La Valse, first heard by Diaghilev in its two-piano version, now much more commonly heard in its full orchestral iteration.

Which do you prefer?

Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition always sounds very un-Mussorgskian in its various orchestral treatments (Ravel's the most popular).

Thankfully, the piano original is back in fashion!

The great Lacrimosa, with its four soloists, full chorus and inexorable build-up in Verdi's Requiem was prefigured by a shorter, somewhat less layered version in an early draft of his opera Don Carlo.

Any suggestions of others? My Facebook stream has 18 suggestions of musical no-makeup selfies.

Let's get this ball rolling!