Dear Diary: Borodin
As I write, I’m listening to something that I haven’t heard in well over twenty years. The last time that this music was in my library, it was on an LP. Very likely, I probably still have the LP, in storage. I can well imagine that, the last time I looked at it, I promised myself that I would make a tape recording. Because tape was still the only other game in town. Then, along came modern times, pretty much like the Jamestown Flood. Lots was lost.
But a phrase stuck in my mind, and so did the knowledge that this phrase was written by Alexander Borodin, my favorite Russian composer. (I think of Tchaikovsky as a Baltic writer, classed with Sibelius and Grieg, and not as a true Russian.) I thought for the longest time that the Borodin phrase came from a piano trio, but in fact it turns out to come at the end of the composer’s Piano Quintet in c.
When I acquired the LP — I’m not entirely sure that I actually paid for it; this would have been during my radio days in Houston — it was unusual in featuring chamber music from outside the Viennese-classical canon. Like most callow youths, I regarded chamber music as either ennobling or boring, and possibly both, but never as fun. And the Borodin, despite its minor-mode signature, is fun. And when it’s not being fun it’s gorgeous, the way the sun on the snow is gorgeous after your first all-nighter with a significant other.
The work on the flip side of the LP was Mendelssohn’s Piano Sextet, Op 110. I picked up the Naxos recording of that a while back, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. What I was looking for is what I’m listening to right now, this very minute. I wish that I could whistle it for you.
When you re-read a novel that made a big impression twenty or thirty years ago, when you read it the first time, you find yourself wondering if you’ve actually ever read it before: books change, and that’s, in the end, the mosts lovable thing about them. Novels are always new.
Music, at least for me, is just the opposite. Oh, I’m not saying that this Borodin quintet “takes me back.” It doesn’t. The only thing that it reminds me of is a time when I thought that it was very beautiful, and I think that it’s beautiful right now in very much the same way. As with a book, I hear things that I didn’t hear the first time, but the sense of seeing an old friend again as if no time had intervened is very strong, and pretty terrific.