Noctave
Portrait of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, in moonlight

Composer

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

1844–1908 · 1 piece in Noctave

Born in 1844 in Tikhvin, in north-western Russia, Rimsky-Korsakov was first a naval officer who composed as an amateur, within the group of Russian composers known as “the Five”. In 1871 he became a professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he trained a whole generation, Stravinsky among them. He is known mostly for operas and orchestral works such as Scheherazade; he wrote little for the piano. Flight of the Bumblebee is an interlude from Act III of his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1900), after Pushkin.

The catalogue version is a piano reduction of that orchestral interlude. The right hand plays chromatic sixteenth notes almost without a break, at nearly ten notes per second, and nearly a third of the notes carry an accidental. Settle on a chromatic-scale fingering first and keep it throughout. Noctave's reduced tempo helps here: raise the speed step by step, only once each passage is even.

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The score, free. The version that falls in light, in Noctave: the notes come down to your keyboard at your tempo, then fade to leave you the score. Noctave is coming soon to Android: leave your address to hear when it is out.

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