CD Baby Web Page on Alpine Dances
The zither and the hammered dulcimer get together on this CD, for an hour of happy music, music for dancing as well as listening. Dances include polka, schottisch, minuet, Landler, boarischer (Bavarian), and a few lines of waltz. The boarischer, in 2/4 tempo with well-accented beats, is usually danced more slowly than the polka but sometimes faster in some areas. The Landler dances played here range from the very slow Baumgartenmüllner to the livelier Halbinger and Tegernauer. The Schattnseitn Landler represents a mixed form of dance in which four sixteen-bar Landler segments (eight bars repeated) are each followed by an eight-bar waltz segment. Sometimes, as here, there may be a final playthrough of the whole piece, with or without repeats. The Sebastian Menuett is very slow and gentle, almost like a lullaby. The three polkas and the schottisch are played in the usual lively tempo. Incidentally, the Amelien Polka (Track 4) was written in 1860 by Duke Max of Bavaria, father of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and it sounds as fresh almost a hundred and fifty years later as it did then
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