Teddybears' picnic Chamber music by Rimsky-Korsakov - reviewed by ROBERT ANDERSON '... idiomatic writing that is a constant delight.'

The career of Rimsky-Korsakov is more remarkable than that of most composers. With a first symphony done, he described himself as 'a mere boy who had composed something, an ignorant naval officer who could not even play decently'. Still more astonishing was his production while still in his twenties of The Maid of Pskov or Ivan the Terrible, an opera partly written while sharing rooms with a Musorgsky busy at Boris Godunov, and that was later when revised to become a superb vehicle for Chaliapin as the psychopathic tsar such as to make Elgar wonder about writing a King Lear for him. When already appointed professor of composition at St Petersburg Conservatoire, Rimsky decided his musical equipment was inadequate and he must stiffen his command of harmony and counterpoint. As he himself confessed: 'Having undeservedly become a Conservatory professor, I soon became one of its best students'.

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