Flight of the Bumblebee

Few pieces in music buzz with such manic charm as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Flight of the Bumblebee'. Written as an orchestral interlude in his 1899-1900 opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, it has long since escaped the stage to become a standalone whirlwind.

The work is a dazzling illusion: a swarm of notes darting, weaving, ricocheting with impossible velocity. Strings and woodwinds chase each other in a breathless relay, mimicking the erratic zigzag of a bumblebee in flight. It's a fantastic sonic sprint, each phrase tumbling headlong into the next, leaving listeners exhilarated - and slightly dizzy.

Zubin Mehta conducting the piece with the Berlin Philharmonic in the 1997 open-air concert at Waldbuhne, the spectacular amphitheatre nestled in the woods of West Berlin, turns into a sheer magical jugalbandi of man and nature.


Rimsky-Korsakov becomes a masterclass in control - chaos sculpted into coherence. It is at once serious art and a delightful caricature, a rare hybrid that delights across audiences. In the piece, the Russian composer bottled the essence of motion. Experience it as a chase, a blur, a joyful sting of sound.