Borodin left Prince Igor, his only opera, incomplete at the time of his death in 1887. We’re used to hearing it in an edition by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov that filled in missing sections and smoothed out the episodic plot. When the New York Met unveiled its production earlier this year, however, the opera was given in a new version by director Dmitri Tcherniakov and conductor Gianandrea Noseda that jettisoned the interpolations and restored passages of genuine Borodin that his editors had cut. Structurally, the end result is at times wayward, which Tcherniakov largely circumvents by reimagining the opera as a first world war drama about survivor guilt and the need for personal regeneration after collective trauma: the Polovtsian scenes, famously eroticised and set in a poppy field, are actually the wounded Igor’s hallucinations while suffering from concussion. Ildar Abdrazakov is mightily impressive in the title role, and there are powerhouse performances from Stefan Kocán as Konchak and Mikhail Petrenko as Galitsky. Noseda, as always in Russian music, is formidable.
