Composer Thomas Ades adapted his 'Marchentanze' (originally a duet) for violin and orchestra for a frequent partner of Ades’, violinist Pekka Kuusisto, by a commission from the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and L’Auditori in Barcelona in 2021. It was premiered by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Helsinki on 29 October 2021 with Pekka Kuusisto as the soloist.
The fairy-tale world implied by the title is brought to life in a musical idiom drawing on English folk music, lending an accessible and compelling grass roots feel. The third movement, ‘A Skylark (for Jane)’, is a violin solo in the violin-and-piano version of the work, but in the orchestral version the orchestra joins the violin with a loosely sketched flight of skylarks, as it were. Casting the violin as a skylark inevitably prompts an association with an English classic, the tone poem 'The Lark Ascending' (1914) for violin and orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams.