Friday, May 6, 2011

Living Room Dance Party #10



This Living Room Dance Party pick reminds me a lot of Dance Party #1, Carmina Burana.  This is one of the Polovstian Dances - Wild Dance of the Men - from Alexander Borodin's opera, Prince Igor. The Polovstian (also spelled Polovestian) Dances are famous in the own right, and you can find plenty of albums with them on them, but if you want just this track, you can snag it on Amazon.  I'd suggest this entire album -


All the Polovstian dances are fantastic, plus it has Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition which will definitely be appearing as a Living Room Dance Party as well.  Bombastic, crazed, a flurry of sound, Borodin's Wild Dance of the Men was my personal first dance party.  My younger brother and I would beg to hear this song and then run around the house like we were monsters.  I don't know if I can adequately describe our choreography - the music rises, rises, rises - then faaaaallllllsssss!  It calms in the middle and builds, but wilds it up again.  It's short - around the two minute mark - so it's perfect for short attention spans.  Whirling dervish might come close to our chosen steps - be creative and find your own sweet dance moves!

Side note - Alexander Borodin is an incredibly fascinating person!  Russian-born, his main vocation was as a famous chemist, physician and teacher, but he also studied composition under Rimsy-Korsakov - he was even awarded a post-humus Tony award 67 years after his death for compositions included in the musical Kismet!

1 comment:

Jane said...

Included in the musical? They basically ripped off the entire Prince Igor opera to make Kismet. Only with new English words.
I was amazed the first time I heard the opera all the way through at how much is in Kismet. I think there might be two notes they DIDN'T use.
It is awesome unrestrained music.

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