Word: korsakov
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Moussorgsky's Khovantchina Prelude and Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumble Bee by Sir Hamilton Harty and the Halle Orchestra of Manchester (Columbia, $2) - Superlative recording of the music of onetime roommates. Khovantchina, like Moussorgsky's Boris, is as Russian in character as Red Square in Moscow, its first scene. Rimsky's Bee is less important but better known by reason of its flashing imagery...
...Russia, some 100 miles from Leningrad. Merchants there knew that they owed their prosperity to the singer Sadko, often told their children how he had made the River Volkhov to flow, thus opening their city to the sea. The legendary Sadko appealed to famed Russian Composer Nicolas Andreievich Rimsky-Korsakov, who wrote an opera about him in which is included "The Song of India." In its proper setting, in the opera Sadko, it was heard for the first time in the U. S. last week at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House...
Composer. The music of Rimsky-Korsakov is shining, ornamental stuff, richly Russian in its sheen. That it is smooth, well made, is a never-ending source of wonder to those acquainted with the facts of his career. For Nicolas Andreievich Rimsky-Korsakov did not begin life as a musician. He was sent to the Naval College at St. Petersburg as befitted the son of an aristocrat. For eleven years he served in the navy, on one cruise visited the U. S. But all that time his thoughts were on music-on the sort that a small Jewish band had played...
Sadko, produced last week 22 years after its composer's death, is one of 13 Rimsky-Korsakov operas, besides which he wrote many orchestral works and songs. Chronologically it comes between the popular Snow Maiden and Coq d'Or (best-known excerpt: "The Hymn to the Sun"). For many, Rimsky reached in Sadko the height of his musical powers. He himself thought well of it, often pointed with pride to his original use of the bylina, a recitative style borrowed from Russian epics...
...American premiére of Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko, at Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan...