Biography (read more)
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, born 18 March 1844 and died 21 June 1908, and a member of the nationalist group of composers known as The Five. A career naval officer before becoming a professor of composition, harmony, and orchestration at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1871, he undertook a rigorous three-year program of self-education to master Western compositional technique, which he then combined with the folk-inspired, orientalist idiom he shared with Glinka and The Five. His best-known orchestral works, including Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade, are staples of the concert repertoire, alongside excerpts from his fifteen operas, among them The Tale of Tsar Saltan, source of the popular orchestral interlude Flight of the Bumblebee.
Rimsky-Korsakov is considered the chief architect of the ‘Russian style’ in classical orchestration, preparing works by fellow members of The Five for performance and shaping a generation of composers through his decades as an educator and his influential orchestration textbook. His command of orchestral colour and folk-inspired melody influenced composers well beyond Russia, including Debussy, Ravel, Dukas, and Respighi, and Flight of the Bumblebee has become one of the most widely recognized displays of orchestral virtuosity in classical music.
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