Aleksandr Porfirʹevich Borodin

Borodin’s First Symphony was one of his earliest large-scale works and shows a great increase of technical skill over anything he had done before. Of course, it was a brave decision on Borodin’s part to undertake a symphony when he had little experience of large-scale form and none of orchestration. The influence of Schumann is rather apparent, although the example of Berlioz is more heeded in the imaginative and many­hued orchestration. The...