What do they mean by "suite"

[beethoartok]

Sorry for this dumb question, but what exactly is a suite? The audition instructions say either a complete sonata or a suite. Would Mendelssohn's Complete Fantasy in F# minor be a suite? by playing all three movements?

[pseudopianist]

A suite is a collection of dances, I believe. Often ending with a Gigue.
I don't think the Mendelssohn piece would be qualified as a suite. 

[pianonut]

it's probably best to ask the panel before you practice the mendelssohn, but in the harvard dictionary it says:  "after circa 1750 the dance suite gave way to sonata designs (p.815)...divertimento, partita...neo-classicists of the 19th and 20th century (saint saens, hindemith) created large corpus of such suites, and others contributed to a major revival of the orchestral suite(debussy, sibelius).  Sometimes the title 'suite' is used for collections of movements that could be considered multimovement tone poems (massenet, holst -mendelssohn?) often with a nationalistic flavor.

of course nutcracker suite by tchaikovsky and firebird suite by stravinsky ARE danced to. 

[thierry13]

I think the mendelssohn could be ok, since it has the "form" of a sonata, in the way that it as three movements, and it is a long piece too I think? (only heard the first movement, and I just loved it  ).

[apion]

Sorry for this dumb question, but what exactly is a suite? The audition instructions say either a complete sonata or a suite. Would Mendelssohn's Complete Fantasy in F# minor be a suite? by playing all three movements?

That's not a dumb question. 

A "suite" is a group of things forming a unit or constituting a collection:

(1) a 17th and 18th century instrumental musical form consisting of a series of dances in the same or related keys;

(2) a modern instrumental composition in several movements of different character;

(3) a long orchestral concert arrangement in suite form of material drawn from a longer work (as a ballet).