5 Greek Dances

Skalkottas composed the 36 Greek Dances in three sets of twelve between 1931 and 1936, after returning to Athens from a decade in Berlin where he had studied with Schoenberg; he worked as a rank-and-file orchestral violinist and left almost everything unperformed. The five-dance selection for string orchestra was first played in London on 1 December 1953 under Walter Goehr, four years after his death, and Universal Edition published it in 1956. The tunes are folk material, but the harmonisations are anything but conventional, and the collection is now his most widely played work.