borodin seems to have been a bit of a pain to work with as a musical colleage/fellow composer (like all the mighty five except for balakirev, he was not a professional musician). it seems almost half of his stuff was either finished or orchestrated by glazunov and/or rimsky, and rimsky actually writes about the difficult night before the orchestration of polovtsian dances was due for rehearsal by the orchestra. apparently borodin had put off doing this so much that on the night before it was needed for copying/distribution, he hopped over to rimsky's house and the two of them plus anatoly liadov spent the whole night writing orchestra parts by hand.
if you know anything by borodin, it's either the very famous dance of the maidens from this little set of dances, or the nocturne from his string quartet no. 2.
ozawa/berlin.
there are several different dances, each ascribed to the different groups of people dancing. the first theme, in flute solo, with the distinctive triplets, is given in a slow 4/4 andantino, and is an introduction. it's followed by the most famous tune, at 0:58. this represents the dance of maidens. this theme plays with the a major key and its relative minor, giving a sort of modal feel. the diminished fourth in the second half of the phrase is a bit of "exotic" flavor to the melody.
at 3:10 we suddenly go into 3/4 with a more rambunctious galloping dance, which is representative of a general dance by everyone. it's actually got hints of ravel for me (or i guess it would be more accurate to say that ravel has traces of this type of festiveness and sliding chromatic scales in some of his colorful orchestral music).
5:17 goes back into duple meter, but is a brisk 6/8. this is apparently a dance of the boys, in presto. it builds to a sort of minor climax, but then all of a sudden we are back with the dance of the maidens at 6:40 or so. but then at 7:37 he decides to incorporate the theme from the dance of the boys in as well. they work well simply superimposed upon each other. then gradually the triplet rhythm takes over and we're back in the presto dance. now the tension starts building again for the second time.
now we get, in the same tempo, a running sixteenth note theme which i think that this particular recording skips the first time it's supposed to come around (which is directly after the first dance of the maidens). this is supposed to be a wild dance of men that first time, but along with a very very fast version of the introduction theme, it is now just a general dance. it leads to a rather rousing conclusion.
since this piece is part of an opera, i'll say a bit about what part of the opera these dances are supposed to represent. they occur at the bottom of act 2. prince igor has been captured by the polovtsy after his failed campaign, but since he didn't ask for mercy when he was captured, the ruler, Konchak, orders that he be treated like an honored guest, even offering him freedom on the condition that igor not wage war against them again. igor refuses, saying he can't lie, and konchak regrets that they were not born to be allies. he summons polovtsian slaves to entertain igor, and these dances are that entertainment.
the opera is, of course, about igor's escape and redemption. he returns and saves his own kingdom from destruction at the hands of a neighboring prince.
the main criticism of this opera is that it's not dramatically coherent, and borodin wrote his libretto pretty much as he composed the music. as a result they weren't able to make the music and the plotline cohere as well as they should have. and it also didn't help that he died before he finished, but this work was in progress for almost 20 years. so only pieces of it have really been enduring, this being one of them and the overture being the other.
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