A Winter's Tale (Larsson)


A Winter's Tale, Op. 18, is a four-movement suite for orchestra written from 1937 to 1938 by Swedish composer Lars-Erik Larsson. The Epilogue is often performed and recorded as a stand-alone concert piece.

Background

Beginning in 1937, the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation—the country's national, publicly funded radio—employed Larsson as a composer-in-residence, music producer, and conductor; his main task was to write music to accompany various radio programs. One of Larsson's colleagues was the Swedish poet Hjalmar Gullberg, who had joined Swedish Radio the year before and headed its drama division. Together, the two men developed a genre of popular entertainment they called the "lyrical suite", which alternated recited poetry with musical interludes. Larsson's first commission of this type was to compose four orchestral vignettes to accompany the 1938 radio recitation of a Swedish-language translation Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale; he subsequently published these as A Winter's Tale.

Structure

A Winter's Tale, which lasts about 9 to 10 minutes, is in four movements. They are as follows:

Instrumentation

A Winter's Tale the following instruments:
published the suite in 1945.

Recordings

The sortable table below lists commercially available recordings of A Winter's Tale:
ConductorOrchestraTimeRecording venueLabel
1Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra197710:19Stockholm Concert Hall
2Stockholm Sinfonietta198010:24CirkusBIS
3CBC Vancouver Orchestra199210:02OrpheumCBC Records
4New York Scandia Symphony200110:53Trinity ChurchCentaur
5Jönköping Sinfonietta20029:51Jönköping Concert Hall
6Norrköping Symphony Orchestra200910:51De GeerhallenNaxos
7201110:19cpo