Polovtsian Dances (new edition)

The Polovtsian Dances rank among the most vivid and celebrated pages of nineteenth-century Russian music theatre. They come from the opera “Prince Igor”, on which Alexander Borodin — a chemist by profession and a composer by passion — worked for nearly two decades, leaving it unfinished at his death in 1887. As a member of “The Mighty Handful”, the influential St Petersburg group of composers centred around Balakirev, Borodin shared the ambition to forge a genuinely Russian musical language emancipated from the Western European tradition.

In the Polovtsian Dances, Borodin unfolds a sensuous orchestral world suffused with oriental timbres. Exotic modality, irresistible rhythmic drive, and luminous instrumentation combine to create a movement of immediate and powerful effect. The orchestra — scored with extensive percussion and full wind sections — generates a richly coloured, dynamically wide-ranging sound world that shifts between shimmering, delicate pianissimo and elemental rhythmic force.

The Dances are performed in the concert hall far more often than in the opera house today, and are regarded as one of the most frequently played orchestral works of Russian Romanticism — a piece that has lost virtually none of its magic to this day.