Canadian Music Centre Suite of Miniature Dances - Applebaum - Concert Band - Gr. 5

Composer: Louis Applebaum
Format: Score and Parts
Instrumentation: Concert Band
Grade: 5

Suite of Miniature Dances is drawn from the incidental music for a ballroom scene in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well. The premiere performance, held during the inaugural season of the world-renowned Stratford Festival (in Stratford, Ontario) in 1953, was directed by Tyrone Guthrie and starred Alec Guiness and Irene Worth.
That production was set in the late 19th century rather than in the more conventional Elizabethan period, providing more scope for the musical style. A Shakespearean production always generates a dilemma for the composer: how to communicate to a contemporary audience an aural sense of another era, sometimes one for which no musical materials or aural impressions exist.
The scene (Act II, scene iii) was played as a series of short dances, allowing the music to reflect a progression of changes of mood and action. Although the 1953 production used a 7-player pit orchestra of winds and harp, I have re-orchestrated Dance for full concert band.

Duration: 4:00