Symphony no. 2 in B minor

Conceived early in 1869, the Second Symphony took Borodin until 1876 to finish, delayed by his duties as a chemist, teacher and editor of a scientific journal. It grew alongside Prince Igor and shares its world: the Russian heroic epic, which by then occupied the whole circle around him — Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko, the folk-song collecting of Mussorgsky and Balakirev, Pushkin's poems and Glinka's Ruslan. Stasov attached the epithet Bogatyr to it. Borodin played the first movement to Balakirev and Cui in 1870; the premiere followed in St Petersburg in 1877.