Debussy: Danse bohémienne - wind quintet

Debussy: Danse bohémienne 

La Danse bohémienne (Bohemien Dance) is a piano piece composed in the late summer of 1880. This is the composer's first published piano work. It was judged by Tchaikovsky as follows...

"It's really a very nice thing, though really too short; not one thought is expressed through to the end and the form is extremely messy and devoid of wholeness ... " 

It was written when he was eighteen years old for Nadejda von Meck, Tchaikovsky's rich and generous patroness.

 Frank Dawes writes of the "Danse bohémienne, "there is perhaps a mild gipsiness that may have been picked up from the gipsy singers at the Moscow cabarets that Debussy is reputed to have frequented. In texture the piece has something of the salon style of Tchaikovsky, though very much simplified." 

This straightforward piece, in B minor and 2/4 time, isn't altogether without a few dashes of polka rhythm, but its only notable point of originality comes in the coda, where a tonic chord over a submediant pedal point highlights the interval of a major seventh, possible slightly Russian in character.

The score was first published in 1932 by Schott (Maintence), then by Henle (1991, ed. Ernst-Günter Heinemann) and Durand (2000, ed. Roy Howat)

It is arranged for standard wind quintet.