Flight of the Bumblebee

Arranger Jonathan Oliver says, “Flight of the Bumblebee, written by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, was created as an orchestral interlude during Act 3 of his opera The Tale of Tsar Sultan. During this moment, a magical Swan-Bird changes Prince Gvidon into a bumblebee so that he can fly away to visit his father, who does not realize that his son is alive. The music has become more known as a virtuoso solo work for all forms of musical instruments and has even been included into other forms of media, such as film and television.

For this arrangement, I decided to divide the technical demand of the solo work into a quartet, with each part having no more than four measures of the melody at a time. The musical demand of the work now lies with the performers’ ability to make the faster sixteenth note patterns sound as a single line instead of four individual lines.”