Lancette Arts Journal |
CD Reviews From our Archives |
January 2004 |
BORODIN, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Bramwell
Tovey, conductor, CBC Records,
SMCD 5231, 69:33 minutes
By Alidė Kohlhaas
There is at times a tender sweetness to Alexander Porfirevich Borodin's music that surely arises from his easygoing manner. The casual tone of this esteemed professor of chemistry's home allowed that his apartment on the grounds of the Academy of Medicine in St. Petersburg became a perpetual meeting place for students, relatives, and innumerable friends, the latter invariably musicians. Borodin, a practical man, considered his compositional life simply a Sunday job, and we must marvel that he managed to compose anything at all that is of consequence. Yet, he did. His only operatic work, Prince Igor, on which he worked for 15 years, in the end had to be completed by his friends Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov after Borodin died unexpectedly from a burst artery in the heart on February 2, 1887, just a little over 53 years old.
In a new recording by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, directed by Bramwell Tovey, we get a chance to hear the genius of Borodin. He was probably the most gifted, next to Modest Musorgsky, of that group of Russian composers known as the "Kuchka" (The Mighty Handful). The other three members were Rimsky-Korsakov, Cesar Cui, and Mily Balakirev, the group's figurehead. Musically they were Russian nationalists, and so employed the sounds of their vast native country, composed of Europeans as well as Asians. It made for some very mighty and compelling music.
The CD, produced by CBC Records, features the Overture to Prince Igor that Glazunov, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, completed from the composer's sketches and themes from the opera. It sounds very fine in this reading by Tovey, who has the right touch to bring
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