Tone Poem Tuesday

I don’t think I’ve featured Alexander Borodin in quite a while! Time to rectify that with a piece I’ve featured before, and will feature again, because it’s just that good.

First, though, a question: Who is an artist whose output you adore and dearly wish there was more of it? An artist to whom you would give that time-turner thing from Harry Potter or give access to HG Wells’s time machine, if only so they could give themselves more time to produce their art? For me, the answer would be Borodin. Every piece of his that I’ve heard makes me want to hear more…and yet, one can sadly listen to just about all of his output in just a few hours–a day, at most, if one takes breaks.

Borodin wasn’t just one of the great Russian composers; he was also a chemist by trade and he was quite a good one, good enough that his day job as a chemist allowed him to live comfortably, keeping composition as a hobby. Anyone who has ever used a day job to fund their daily life while they pursue a hobby would be envious of the degree to which Alexander Borodin was able to accomplish things with his hobby: while he was a renowned teacher of chemistry and did important research work in that field, in music he is one of the immortals.

David Dubal writes, in The Essential Canon of Classical Music:

For the rest of Borodin’s relatively short life, stealing precious time for composition was an unsolvable problem. He was absentminded and disorganized, and that, added to this wife’s ill health, her relatives, her cats, and his medical and chemistry students, made for a frantic domestic life. In addition, colleagues at the medical school laments his frequent absences to pursue trivialities. The good-natured Borodin seldom refused to give of his time or do a favor.

Sadly, Borodin only lived to the age of 53, when he was suddenly stricken while dancing at a ball and died within minutes. How I wish he’d had more time! His output is not large, but oh, what an output it is. Again, Dubal:

His music is the most lyrical in spirit of the Russian Five [a group of prominent Russian composers whose work formed the basis of the Russian nationalistic school, comprised of Cesar Cui, Mily Balakirev, Modest Moussourgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin], and his melodies possess a delicate “oriental” atmosphere. His compositions have a special sweetness as well as a legendary character. In highly charged and picturesque music, Borodin idealized the savage life of the Russian steppes. His pieces have the allure of blazing Tartar blades and Arabian steeds in the heat of battle. It is music that leaps forward and seductively whispers mysterious romances in the slow movements.

Borodin’s music is exotic and wondrous, suggestive of familiar emotions in unfamiliar lands. It’s music that almost makes you smell the cookfires and hear the snorting of the beasts as they charge.

This work is one of his most famous excerpts: the Polovtsian Dances from his opera Prince Igor. Borodin died before he finished the opera, and even though Rimsky-Korsakov made a game effort in completing it based on Borodin’s sketches, the opera has never really made it to the repertoire in the west, owing to its difficult nature and the fact that it’s in Russian, a language relatively few singers learn. But the overture and the big show-stopping Act II number, the Polovtsian Dances, are staples of the concert stage. The Dances are often performed with the choral parts omitted, but in honesty, I just have never been able to reconcile myself to the Dances as a purely orchestral work. The chorus adds so much character, even though I have no idea what those folks are singing.

This performance of the Polovtsian Dances is from a staging of Prince Igor in full. I also find the choreography here enchanting. The Dances, in the story, are a tableaux that is performed by the Polovtsian Tribe for the captive Prince Igor.

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