PRINCE IGOR
Aleksandr Borodin is wonderful proof that one can be an extraordinarily talented composer and yet devote one’s professional life to something else completely. Borodin’s vocation as a physician and chemist as well as a composer and member of the nationalistic “Russian Five”–Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Cui were the others–left him with never enough time to devote to composition. He was frequently pestered by the other members of the group of composers and their mentor, critic Vladimir Stassov, to devote more time to his music. But there were always distractions.
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Some 20 years after beginning work on the opera, Borodin, in a burst of enthusiasm, decided to finish it. But he died suddenly before he could. The opera’s various scenes were found all over his house, done in pencil, and it fell to Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov to pull them together into a cohesive Opera, based as much on what Borodin had played for them and told them about how he had conceived the work as on his finished music. Glazunov later admitted that he had actually composed the famous overture, from Borodin’s themes, as well as all of act three, which is usually omitted in performances. Most of the orchestrations are Rimsky-Korsakov’s.
Metropolitan Opera bass Paul Plishka sang both the villainous Prince Galitsky and the Polovtsian Khan with considerable authority, though with uneven tone in the lower register. Both characterizations were effective and convincing, and though his voice was decidedly weak in the prologue, it sounded better as it warmed up through the performance–even if one would have preferred a darker, deeper color for this music.
A spectacular new recording of the work has just come out on the new Sony Classical label, the first available in several years, done by the Russian Sofia National Opera. This is the first recording I have come across of the entire work (including Glazunov’s act three). Besides being a welcome and long-overdue document of the entire work, it also serves to show how carefully Prince Igor was cut for Grant Park’s presentation. It’s a very long opera (some four and a half hours), but the essence of it was adequately communicated even after it was trimmed to less than three hours, including an intermission. One could quibble about no librettos having been made available for a work sung in Russian. But perhaps the best thing was just to sit back and let the unusual sonorities pour over you during a gorgeous Chicago twilight.
