Symphonic poem Borodin's "In the Steppes of Central Asia" "powerful orchestral pictures, each unique in its composer's output". Titled a "musical portrait", "In the Steppes of Central Asia" evokes the journey of a caravan across the steppes. "Night on Bald Mountain", especially its original version, contains harmony that is often striking, sometimes pungent and highly abrasive; its initial stretches especially pull the listener into a world of uncompromisingly brutal directness and energy. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote only two orchestral works that rank as symphonic poems, his "musical tableau" "Sadko" (1867–92) and "Skazka" ("Legend", 1879–80), originally titled "Baba-Yaga". While this may perhaps be surprising,
Symphonic poem While none of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's symphonic poems has a Russian subject, they hold musical form and literary material in fine balance. (Tchaikovsky did not call "Romeo and Juliet" a symphonic poem but rather a "fantasy-overture", and the work may actually be closer to a concert overture in its relatively stringent use of sonata form. It was the suggestion of the work's musical mid-wife, Balakirev, to base "Romeo" structurally on his "King Lear", a tragic overture in sonata form after the example of Beethoven's overtures.) Among later Russian symphonic poems, Sergei Rachmaninoff's "The Rock" shows as much the influence of