Rachmaninov was fond of arranging his orchestral works for piano, four hands. He also made a fair number of transcriptions of works by other composers for a single pair of hands, though his efforts in this realm were far more modest than those of, say, Liszt, whose grandiose paraphrases and fantasies often overpowered the source work, making the results more his own creation than a mere transformation of the music to the keyboard. Rachmaninov usually remained faithful to the original score, reducing its essence to the piano in a no-frills, though not necessarily unchallenging, way.

In his transcription of the Flight of the Bumblebee he delivers a straightforward, one-minute account of Rimsky-Korsakov's busy bumblebee. There's no embellishment here, only runs of phenomenal speed that would exclude those pianists of less-than-superior technique. Rachmaninov captures the colors and atmosphere and is content to let the snippet of music speak for itself.

This was one of the composer's best-known transcriptions, one he played on many concert tours.



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