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Sinfonietta
1989

2 flutes
2 oboes
2 clarinets 
2º doubling bass clarinet
2 bassoons
 2º doubling contrabassoon
2 horns
2 trumpets
2 trombones
tuba
percussion 
  
bass drum, 6 burmese gongs, deskbell, glockenspiel, guiro, maracas, marimba, sistrum,
  snare drum, suspended cymbal, tabor, tambourine, tam-tam, timbales, triangle, timpani

celeste 
doubling harpsichord and piano
harp
strings

duration 16'

first performance:
Omaha Symphony Chamber Orchestra, cond. Bruce Hangen
Witherspoon Hall, Omaha / January 13, 1990 

awards:
1st Prize Omaha Symphony Guild New Music Contest 1990


RECORDING
March 1991 performance by the New England Philharmonic, cond. Jeffrey Rink
 

SCORE
Movement 1
Movement 2
Movement 3
Movement 4

REVIEW
Andy Vores is a young composer in our midst whose name has come to be a token of quality, flnish, professionalism, acuteness (when there are texts to be set) to verbal niceties, and taste.

“What a bore he must be, then," the reader must be thinking. 

Well, that's the point. The Welsh-born composer Vores writes music that is actually f–n to listen to. (F–n, as if you didn’t know, is often a bad word in the world of serious music.) Friday night, when Jeffrey Rink and the New England Philharmonic were performing Vores' Sinfonietta, your reviewer was wondering if the mastery of orchestration, of the orchestral equivalent of cinematic jump cuts, of this and that didn't all add up to somethlng that was too eclectic, too clever by half.

Your reviewer stopped wondering and instead surrendered to the piece, which is permeated with a sense of the dance. Sometlmes the imagined dancer proceeds as if on wheels, sometimes with a waltzer's sly hesitations, against a backdrop that might be from that old movie The Red Shoes. What a good, glowing performancethese players gave it!

Richard Buell • The Boston Globe