Soirées musicales

The five-movement suite was expanded from incidental music Britten had written for a film in 1935, and was quickly used as the basis of a ballet by Antony Tudor.

In 1935 the young English composer Benjamin Britten started to work for the GPO Film Unit, mainly writing incidental music for promotional documentaries.

[n 1] Using three melodies by the 19th-century composer Gioachino Rossini, Britten arranged a score for boys' voices, flute (doubling piccolo), oboe, clarinet, piano and percussion.

[4] Two years later, in 1937, Britten reworked the music for a full orchestra and added two more movements based on Rossini: a "tirolese" (in the style of a Tyrolean peasant dance) called "La Pastorella dell'Alpi" (The Shepherdess of the Alps) from the Soirées musicales collection, and a tarantella, "La Charité" (Kindness), from Rossini's Trois choeurs religieux.

[10] The suite, which plays for about eleven minutes, is in five movements:[11] The analyst Eric Roseberry writes of Britten's scoring: The suite is scored for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two trumpets, two horns, three trombones, percussion (two players:glockenspiel, xylophone, cymbals, suspended cymbal, triangle, castanets, bass drum and side drum), harp and strings.