Borodin Prince Igor – Gergiev and the Mariinsky

The problem with Prince Igor has always been that it doesn’t quite exist. Borodin spent eighteen years not finishing it, and when he died in 1887 — collapsing at a St. Petersburg party, of all places — he left behind a torso: some acts fully drafted, others barely sketched, the whole magnificent conception unmoored from any final authorial intention. What Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov then did was less an act of editing than of resurrection, and the result has been controversial ever since.

That controversy has sharpened in recent years.

Gergiev’s Mariinsky album uses a newer critical edition that pulls back some of the Glazunov-Rimsky overlay — which sounds scholarly and admirable until you consider that Glazunov, whatever his later self-interested mutterings about copyright, actually sat in Borodin’s living room and heard the man play the music. The famous overture Glazunov wrote out entirely from memory. From memory. Whatever we think of that as musicology, it is an extraordinary act of witness, and discarding it feels less like restoration than substitution. The Brilliant reissue under consideration here stakes its claim to relevance precisely on this point: it gives us the Glazunov-Rimsky score complete, in what is now effectively the only available recording to do so without cuts or substitutions.

The 1990 Sony recording conducted by Emil Tchakarov was always the most useful of his Russian opera series, and revisiting it confirms that impression. Tchakarov — a Bulgarian maestro who died tragically young, at forty-five — had a feel for this music that went beyond mere competence. The Polovtsian Dances erupt with genuine ferocity; the famous “Gliding Dance of the Maidens” has the right floating, narcotized quality, as if the air itself has grown heavy with incense. The orchestra plays with full-blooded commitment, and the Sony engineering captures it without the cardboard dryness that plagued too many studio opera recordings of the period.

None of the singers are native Russian speakers, which matters less than you might think.

Boris Martinovich, the Yugoslav baritone singing Igor, is the center the opera needs. His voice — large, burnished, capable of both lyrical expansiveness and coiled dramatic tension — gives Igor’s great Act II aria a genuine psychological weight. This is a man imprisoned, yes, but also a man wrestling with his own failure of judgment. Martinovich never lets you forget that. The two bass roles, which Boris Christoff memorably doubled in his EMI recording — that older set cuts the entire Third Act, an omission so drastic it almost amounts to a different work — are excellently handled here by two separate singers, each bringing distinct character to Galitsky and Konchak.

Christoff’s recording has its grandeur, and his pairing of the two roles remains one of opera’s legendary vocal feats. But the cuts are indefensible for anyone who wants to know what Prince Igor actually is. The 1951 Bolshoi set is historically interesting and sonically antique; Gergiev’s version is a serious scholarly enterprise that raises serious scholarly questions. Which leaves this Tchakarov reissue doing something genuinely useful — not glamorously, not controversially, but solidly and completely.

The Brilliant box also collects Borodin’s other major works, and that context matters. Hearing the two symphonies and the Second String Quartet alongside the opera is a reminder of how consistently Borodin’s imagination ran toward the steppes, toward open modal harmonies and pentatonic melody — those vast, unhurried melodic arches that feel like horizons receding. The Second Symphony in particular, with its stamping first-movement theme, sounds like the opera’s instrumental twin.

Kismet, the 1953 Broadway musical that pillaged this music — and prompted Glazunov’s late, somewhat ambiguous copyright claims — is irrelevant here except as a measure of how seductive these melodies are. If even Glazunov, decades later, was unsure where Borodin ended and he began, that tells you something profound about the nature of this collaboration. It was an act of love. The music sounds like it.

This set is the one to have.