Turkish Capriccio (Türk Kapriçyosu)

Tüzün wrote Türk Kapriçyosu in the mid-1950s, during his conducting studies in Munich, reportedly after declining a request for his earlier Anadolu Suite and offering a new piece instead; the first performance followed in Ankara in December 1963. The music takes Anatolian dance metres and folk melodic turns into a Western orchestra without smoothing out their asymmetry — the aksak rhythms are kept, not adapted. Born in Istanbul in 1929, Tüzün belonged to the generation after the Turkish Five and died at forty-eight, leaving an opera on the Midas legend and a small orchestral catalogue.