Ballet Suite No. 4 for Flute Ensemble

From the Publisher

Incredible Shostakovich ! From one simple theme he manages to produce – with equal ease – a dark and gloomy piece, a sweet and nostalgic melody or a breathtaking song.

We know he lived in a totalitarian society, where nationalism tries to impose its constraints and straitjackets onto the artistic language.

His music is extraordinary because one can sense the fight for freedom, the contradictions of man… We get a glimpse of the the regime’s official composer (in the introduction, the Limpid Stream passage, the ballet staged in a collective farm of the party), of the restricted man (forced to a more traditionalist approach in the writing of his valz, extracted from the East-German propagandist film Song of the Great Rivers), forced to conform to the ideals of the regime… Yet everything he cannot say, his music expresses : struggle, dissent, resistance, freedom!

Item Details

Instrumentation

• Part 1: Piccolo
• Part 2: Flute
• Part 3: Flute
• Part 4: Flute
• Part 5: Flute
• Part 6: Alto Flute
• Part 7: Bass Flute
• Part 8: Contrabass Flute