Leader, ALFRED BARKER
Conductor, T. H. MORRISON
In 1901 Rimsky-Korsakov was seized with a desire to write an opera on a Polish subject, partly as a tribute to Chopin, whom he had long admired, partly because he wished to introduce in it some melodies his mother had heard in the days when his father had held a Polish governorship and which she had sung to him as a baby. So he commissioned a libretto on lines laid down by himself: plenty of drama, no politics, a slight fantastic element, and plenty of dancing. Pan Voevoda, completed in the autumn of 1902, was the result.