A Winter's Tale (in Swedish: ; subtitled: Four Vignettes after Shakespeare ()), Op. 18, is a four-movement suite for orchestra written from 1937 to 1938 by Swedish composer Lars-Erik Larsson. The Epilogue (No. 4) 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 is scored the following instruments:
Woodwinds: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (in B), and 2 bassoons Brass: 2 horns (in F), 2 trumpets (in C), and trombone Percussion: timpani Strings: violins, violas, cellos, double basses, and harp
published the suite in 1945.
Recordings The sortable table below lists commercially available recordings of A Winter's Tale: ConductorOrchestraTimeRecording venueLabel1Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra197710:19Stockholm Concert Hall 2Stockholm Sinfonietta198010:24CirkusBIS3 CBC Vancouver Orchestra199210:02Orpheum CBC Records4 New York Scandia Symphony200110:53Trinity ChurchCentaur5 Jönköping Sinfonietta20029:51Jönköping Concert Hall6 Norrköping Symphony Orchestra200910:51De GeerhallenNaxos7 201110:19cpo
Notes, references, and sources