| A Winter's Tale | |
| Image Upright: | 1 |
| Border: | Yes |
| Publisher: | (1945) |
| Native Name: | Swedish: En vintersaga |
| Opus: | 18 |
| Movements: | 4 |
| Duration: | 9 minutes |
| Premiere Location: | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Premiere Conductor: | Lars-Erik Larsson |
| Premiere Performers: | Radio Entertainment Orchestra --> |
A Winter's Tale (in Swedish: Swedish: En vintersaga; subtitled: Four Vignettes after Shakespeare (Swedish: Fyra vinjetter till Shakespeares|italics=no)), 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.
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.
A Winter's Tale, which lasts about 9 to 10 minutes, is in four movements. They are as follows:
A Winter's Tale is scored the following instruments:
2 horns (in F), 2 trumpets (in C), and trombone
published the suite in 1945.
The sortable table below lists commercially available recordings of A Winter's Tale:
| Conductor | Orchestra | Time | Recording venue | Label | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra | 1977 | 10:19 | |||||
| 2 | Stockholm Sinfonietta | 1980 | 10:24 | Cirkus | BIS | |||
| 3 | CBC Vancouver Orchestra | 1992 | 10:02 | CBC Records | ||||
| 4 | New York Scandia Symphony | 2001 | 10:53 | Trinity Church | Centaur | |||
| 5 | Jönköping Sinfonietta | 2002 | 9:51 | Jönköping Concert Hall | ||||
| 6 | Norrköping Symphony Orchestra | 2009 | 10:51 | De Geerhallen | Naxos | |||
| 7 | 2011 | 10:19 | cpo |