Russian composer and musical theorist, was born in 1844 in Tikhvin, in the government of Novgorod. He early manifested a strong interest in music, and began to receive regular instruction of the piano at the age of six. In 1856 his parents sent him to the naval Academy at St. Petersburg. While pursuing the prescribed curriculum, he managed to continue his musical studies and soon associated himself with the composer Mili Balakirev, the dominant figure of a group of young, nationally conscious composers including César Antonovitch Cui, Aleksandr Porfirevich Borodin, and Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky. With Rimski-Korsakov, this group came to be known as the Big Five of Russian music. Upon graduation from the Naval Academy in 1862, Rimski-Korsakov departed on a three-year cruise as a midshipman with the Russian navy. In the course of this voyage he composed the slow movement of his first symphony, subsequently completed, and given its premier performance under Balakirev, in 1865. Six years later, Rimski-Korsakov obtained an appointment as Professor of Practical Composition and Instrumentation at the St. Petersburg Conservatory; he retained this post until his death in 1908. After his retirement from active service in the navy in 1873, he was made inspector of naval bands. The knowledge of the expressive possibilities of the wind instruments which he gained in this capacity was subsequently employed to excellent advantage in the scoring of his compositions. From 1886 to 1890 he acted as conductor of the Russian Symphony Concerts in St. Petersburg.
Rimski-Korsakov is remembered today more for the freshness and brilliance of his instrumentation than for the originality of his musical ideas. This freshness and brilliance is reflected here in his tone-poem, "The Flight Of The Bumble Bee."
