Scheherazade Imaginative orchestrator and supreme colorist, Rimsky-Korsakov, he started the symphonic suite Scheherazade in the summer of 1888, spent in the quiet of a remote village of propitious remote district of Luga, at the time when he had just completed the orchestration of Prince Igor Borodin left unfinished by his friend and colleague, who died the year before. Probably it was the seductive exoticism of that excellent score to fertilise theatrical creativity of the Russian composer. The superb symphonic – it goes without saying – draws inspiration from the tales of the Arabian Nights penetrated in European culture long ago thanks to the fortunate French Galland, according to a taste for exoticism that went spreading exponentially in music but also in painting and more generally in the western custom of the last twenty years the 800 and the first of the new century.