Comments on: Discovering the Sunday Composer

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:05:18 +0000

And I just noticed you’d already mentioned he was a scientist. I will have to brush up on my interesting facts. Or just read what people have written before I write.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:03:42 +0000

Interesting fact: Borodin disapproved of making a career out of music and made a living as a chemistry professor. He wrote music as a “hobby”. I wish I were as good at my hobbies as him.
This fact means that his style of composition is very different to that of other composers in that he is quite oblivious to the trends in classical music being written in Central Europe – trends that influenced other Russian and Eastern European composers. Or so I’ve been told.
Where can I post on here? I have a question I want to ask.

By: R J Keefe

R J Keefe — Sun, 10 May 2009 04:25:21 +0000

An entire Broadway musical, “Kismet,” was lifted from Borodin tunes in the Fifties, and even filmed! The lovely Nocturne from the Second Quartet? “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads.” Borodin is one of those unfortunate chestnuts whom people of my generation (quite wrongly) grew so tired of hearing that he was quietly dropped.

By: JonJ

JonJ — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:22:31 +0000

Borodin might not be known to people just getting into classical music, but he is by no means an obscure composer to moderately experienced classical music fans. Nothing like Zemlinsky, for example.

To somewhat older generations, a lot of his themes are familiar from Kismet, but the young’uns nowadays I suppose don’t know anything about the Broadway musical tradition either. On the other hand, we’re *all* supposed to be intimately familiar with every rock band and hip-hop artist who has come down the pike.

Oh well, tempora mutantur …

By: Yvonne

Yvonne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:51:49 +0000

I would class Borodin as one of those composers who is better known by sound than by name.

For example, if you add to the statistical pool some slightly older people there will be one piece that instantly rings a bell (even if they don’t put Borodin’s name to it). That’s the Nocturne from his Second String Quartet, which also exists in a string orchestra form and, more important, was commandeered for the 1950s musical Kismet. You might find it a bit “sappy” (maybe not), but it’s easy to hear how it became a hit.

Also commandeered for Kismet were two orchestral pops: the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor (look and listen here with Fokine’s original choreography, Gergiev conducting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8C8frqCKKg ) and In the Steppes of Central Asia. (The symphonies are hardly performed at all, at least in English-speaking countries.)