The Seasons, Op. 37a (also seen as Op. 37b; Russian: Времена года; published with the French title Les Saisons), is a set of twelve short character pieces for solo piano by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Each piece is the characteristic of a different month of the year in the northern hemisphere. The work is also sometimes heard in orchestral and other arrangements by other hands. Individual excerpts have always been popular - Troika (November) was a favourite encore of Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Barcarolle (June) was enormously popular and appeared in numerous arrangements (for orchestra, violin, cello, clarinet, harmonium, guitar and even mandolin).
The above text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ( creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ ). It uses material from the Wikipedia article "The Seasons (Tchaikovsky)" ( en.wikipedia.org/ ... i/The_Seasons_(Tchaikovsky) ).