Folk Dances

Folk Dances by Dimitri Shostakovich is a standard repertoire piece for wind bands, but Shostakovich may never have heard it played by a band. Shostakovich’s original was the third movement of his 1942 suite of incidental orchestral music for a musical revue called The Motherland. The suite, written during the bleakest days of World War II, was often somber. The source material of Folk Dances was the “Dance of Youth,” a purely instrumental movement intended, it seems, to lighten the suite. It includes several Russian folk melodies strung together one after the other as it accelerates to a big finish. (Source: Wind Band Literature by Andy Pease)