| Royal Classics |  |
| Disc No: ROY6464 | |
| Price: Sek. 51 |
If we go back to prehistoric times it is safe to assume that there was dancing before there was music. Only gradually did the rhythm of the dance attract organised music because who wants to listen to a tune while leaping about at some primitive ritual? However, gradually dances evolved into types as divers as the slow and graceful Sarabande and the frenetic jumping of the Saltarello. Dance steps, too, became organised: uninhibited cavorting eventually gave way to regularised patterns of movement set down in textbooks and taught with great thoroughness by dancing masters. Then came ballet, at first as an interlude or set-piece in operas and later as an independent art form. This recording gathers some of the greatest of orchestral dances from the last two centuries in a cross-section that shows the enormous diversity of dance forms. Examples of ballet music are provided by Tchaikovsky, Gliere, Delibes, Khachaturian and Ravel, and famous dances are extracted from operas by Weinberger and Saint-Saens. Bizet's Farandole comes from music he wrote for a stage play, and A1beniz's Tirana is drawn from a suite celebrating the music of the Iberian peninsula. Kabalevsky's Galop is the most famous movement of a suite, The Comedians, which he wrote in 1940, the year he joined the Communist Party - but no connection is inferred! Written as pure orchestral music to which nobody is expected to get up and dance, are the works by Grieg and Waldteufel, tributes respectively to Nordic and Hispanic dance forms, while Mendelssohn's Scherzo (composed for Shakespeare's play) and Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol are not strictly dances in themselves but have strong connections with dance styles. Incredibly, Mendelssohn's fast and feather-light Scherzo developed, historically speaking, from the stately Minuet, while Rimsky-Korsakov's Caprice recalls a land which has generated some of the most exciting dance music of all. Robert Dearling. Discontinued |
| Name: Symphonic Dances | |
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| Order 1 CD In stock |
| Composer | Opus | Produced | Music | Key | Performer |
| Albeniz, Isaac | 1990 | Iberia - Triana | Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra - Felix Slakin | ||
| Bizet, Georges | 1990 | L'Arlésienne - Farandole | |||
| Delibes, Léo | 1990 | Sylvia - Pizzicato Polka | |||
| Gliere, Reinhold | 1990 | The red poppy - Russian sailors' dance | |||
| Grieg, Edvard | 1990 | Norwedian Dance no. 2 | |||
| Kabalevsky, Dmitry | 1990 | The Comedians - Galop | |||
| Khachaturian, Aram | 1990 | Gayaneh - Sabre Dance | |||
| Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix | 1990 | A midsommer night's Dream - Scherzo | |||
| Ravel, Maurice | 1990 | Bolero | |||
| Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai | 1990 | Capriccio Espagnole | |||
| Saint-Saéns, Camille | 1990 | Samson et Delia - Bacchanale | |||
| Tchaikovsky, Peter | 1990 | Sleeping Beauty - Waltz | |||
| Waldteufel, Emil | 1990 | Espaņa | |||
| Weinberger, Jaromir Jaromir | 1990 | Schwanda the Bagpiper - Polka |