Beastly light pieces
These booklets make playing together for the first time in a string orchestra or string ensemble a pleasure.
The twelve fun one-minute pieces by Don't Feed the AnimalsOuverüre, ten animal pictures and epilogue for children's orchestra, are suitable as interludes for a performed story. The scampering hedgehog, which pauses shyly at fermatas, the frog's croaking in rubbing small seconds, busy quavers for the ants, trills and tremolo glissandi for the busy bees, the swan hovering in alternating three-quarter and four-four time, the four squirrels scampering in pizzicato leaps and sixteenth-note scales ... It's all cleverly conceived, well distributed among the parts and - with a certain amount of rehearsal - easy to play.
The 14 canons and 6 string trios that Egon Sassmannshaus composed for the Early start in the Steicherensemble provide a variety of keys from a B flat to two sharps. Even a minuet in A minor joins the small baroque dances.
In the Christmas booklet of the same series, 10 Baroque festive dances in simple keys - major and minor - frame 17 of the best-known German Christmas carols in deliberately simple four-part settings for the youngest string groups.
George A. Speckert: Don't Feed the Animals. 12 pieces for string orchestra, score and set of parts (1st, 2nd, 3rd violin, the latter also for viola, cello), BA 10648, € 13.95, Bärenreiter, Kassel
Egon Sassmannshaus: Früher Anfang im Streicherensemble, score for violin, viola (or 2nd violin) and cello, BA 10688, € 12.95, Bärenreiter, Kassel
id., Christmas, score for two violins (one piece for three violins), viola (one piece for two violas) and cello, BA 10689, € 12.95
