Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Rimsky-Korsakov: The Tale of Tsar Saltan

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

I always enjoy broadcasting the fairy-tale operas of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, with their beautiful melodies inspired by Russian folk music and their lush orchestration. This one was commissioned to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great national poet Alexander Pushkin in 1899. The premiere staging of the opera was not ready, however, until the following year. The story presented in the opera is derived almost without alteration from one of Pushkin's fantastical tales. Rimsky's score for Tsar Saltan contains the famous "Flight of the Bumble Bee'--the fantastical, fluttery tune in the orchestra intended in the opera to accompany the scene in which the hero, Prince Gvidon, is magically transformed into a bumble bee so he can travel farther and faster than a human being.

The performance resources employed in the Melodiya CD reissue of Tsar Saltan are Russian through and through. The recording was originally made in Moscow in 1958, so it qualifies as a historical audio document of this work. Vassily Niebolsin conducts the Choir and Orchestra of the USSR State Academic Bolshoi Theatre, with an all-native cast of Russian vocal soloists.