76 - Alexandr Borodin's Князь Игорь (Prince Igor)

A real labour of love, Borodin worked on the opera over a twenty year period and died leaving it incomplete in 1887. Borodin was not a professional composer and wrote the opera in his holidays from his real job, Professor of Chemistry for the Imperial Academy. Fellow composers Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov and Alexandr Glazunov sewed the pieces together into a whole which premiered at the Mariinsky in 1890. The work is an epic of medieval pageantry and contains some glorious music, particularly the well known Polovtsian Dances.

The Polovtsian Dances is well known today thanks to Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes which brought the work to Paris in the early 20th century. The Dances were also the basis, along with several other excerpts from the opera, for the music of the Broadway musical Kismet. The opera itself tells its story in fragmented scenes and it is difficult today to know what structure Borodin intended for the opera. Regardless of the edition of the score chosen it contains some spectacular music, although it is unfortunately rarely seen outside Russia today.

Here is the Polovtsian Dances from the Bolshoi Opera production of 2013.