Tahiti-Trot

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The Tahiti Trot is Shostakovich's orchestration of "Tea for Two" from the musical No No Nanette by Vincent Youmans. Shostakovich wrote it in response to a challenge from conductor Nikolai Malko: after the two listened to the song on record, Malko bet 100 rubles that Shostakovich could not completely re-orchestrate the song from memory in under an hour. Shostakovich took him up and won, completing the orchestration in around 45 minutes. The Tahiti Trot has been a popular encore ever since, and was used as an entr'acte for the ballet The Age of Gold at the suggestion of conductor Alexander Gauk.

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