Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. His wide-ranging output includes symphonies, operas, ballets, instrumental, chamber music and songs. He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, his last three numbered symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin. Born into a middle-class family, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant, despite his obvious musical precocity. He pursued a musical career against the wishes of his family, entering the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1862 and graduating in 1865. This formal, Western-oriented training set him apart from the contemporary nationalistic movement embodied by the influential group of young Russian composers known as The Five, with whom Tchaikovsky's professional relationship was mixed.

Tchaikovsky wrote all four of his orchestral suites in the period between the compostion of his Fourth (1877-1878) and Fifth (1888) Symphonies. Though none of the suites has ever attained a popularity akin to that of the symphonies, the Suite No. 2 (1883), subtitled "Caractéristique," has suffered particular neglect, likely because of its impractical requirement of four accordions in one movement. The work comprises a series of almost balletic character pieces. The main exception is the first movement, "Jeu de sons" (Game of Sounds), whose dimensions (though not its mercurial themes) suggest the opening movement of a symphony. A slow, graceful introduction evokes both the ballet stage and the opening of the composer's Variations on a Rococo Theme (1876). The atmosphere becomes increasingly dark; soon, however, it takes off in a more impulsive direction. Throughout the movement, Tchaikovsky relies on material of a "scurrying" character, calling to mind the Fourth Symphony; at one point he subjects it to fugal treatment.

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