About this Recording
8.572786 - BORODIN, A.P.: Symphonies Nos. 1-3 (Seattle Symphony, Schwarz)

Alexander Porfir’yevich Borodin (1833–1887)
Symphonies Nos. 1–3




Borodin attempted three symphonies, the last of which he never finished. The first, in E flat, took him five years to complete, occupying his intermittent attention from 1862 until 1867. It was given a poor trial performance under Balakirev in March 1868, but was more successful when it was played in the first Russian Music Society concert of 1869. Borodin had met Balakirev first in 1862 and fallen under his influence, of which the First Symphony was a more or less immediate result. The symphony was his first sustained exercise in composition and was subjected to the often contradictory criticism of his new mentor at every step.

The E flat Symphony opens with a slow introduction that contains the germ of the Allegro first subject. An E flat major second movement scherzo shows a debt to Mendelssohn, a favourite with Borodin, while the B major trio has about it more the exotic world of Borodin’s unfinished opera Prince Igor. The D major slow movement is dominated by a melody originally intended for the cor anglais, until the intervention of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, who recommended the use of the cello in its place. The symphony ends with an energetic finale which, in spite of its characteristic second subject, owes much to German tradition and was described by Gerald Abraham as second-hand Schumann, a judgment as harsh as the same writer’s view of the scherzo as second-hand Berlioz, deficiencies for which he regarded the original first movement as ample compensation.


The Third Symphony, of which only two movements exist, uses as a second movement a scherzo in a characteristically uneven rhythm scored originally for string quartet, written in 1882, and orchestrated, as Borodin had intended. The first movement, reconstructed by Glazunov from the composer’s sketches and from his own phenomenal memory, had actually originally been intended as a string quartet, a fact that goes some way to explaining its relatively spare texture and gentle mood. For the Trio Glazunov took music that the composer had written for the first act of Prince Igor but had later rejected.

Keith Anderson

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