An early example of Russian nationalism in orchestral music, this free variation-fantasy draws on two dissimilar Russian folk tunes, a wedding dance (Kamarinskaya) and a wedding song (Over the Hills, the High Hills). The opening bars are surprisingly menacing for a wedding-inspired piece, but soon they give way to the graceful Over the Hills, which almost immediately begins playing off an original countersubject, then disintegrates into material based merely on its first three notes. Soon the strings come to the rescue with the frisky if repetitive Kamarinskaya dance. The basic tune is only a couple of bars long; Glinka sustains interest by constantly varying its orchestration and harmonic and rhythmic settings. Glinka goes back to the beginning (minus the introduction) for a virtual repeat of all this, but varies the details, especially the instrumentation, and wraps it up with a lively hopak treatment of the dance tune.

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