The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34 (subtitle Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell) was written by Benjamin Britten in 1945 for a British Ministry of Education film, Instruments of the Orchestra; the film version (with narration...

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, Op. 66 (composed 1961–62), is a large-scale choral-orchestral work written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral and intended as a musical act of remembrance and reconciliation. Britten interweaves...

“The Typewriter” is a novelty orchestral showpiece completed on 9 October 1950; Anderson scored it for full orchestra with a real typewriter used as a solo percussion instrument (three principal sounds: typing, the carriage return bell, and...

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103, subtitled The Year 1905, was composed in 1957 and premiered in Moscow on 30 October 1957 by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra under Natan Rakhlin (the Leningrad premiere followed on 3...

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, was composed in 1937 (April–July) as a public response to the cultural condemnation he had suffered that year; it premiered on 21 November 1937 in Leningrad with Yevgeny Mravinsky and...

Benjamin Britten’s Symphony for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 68, was composed in 1963 and dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich, who gave the premiere with Britten conducting the Moscow Philharmonic on 12 March 1964. The work’s title reflects...

Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony, Op. 4, was written in 1933–34 and is wholly derived from themes he composed as a child; it is scored for string orchestra (also playable as a string quartet) and typically lasts about 16–18 minutes in...

Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto Op.15, was composed in 1938–39 and premiered in New York in March 1940 with Antonio Brosa as soloist and Sir John Barbirolli conducting. the concerto balances incisive, often percussive orchestral...

Manuel de Falla’s Suite No. 2, Three Dances from El sombrero de tres picos, is an orchestral extraction of the principal dances from Part II of the 1919 ballet. he suite is scored for a medium-to-large orchestra with an emphasis on percussion...

Manuel de Falla’s Suite No. 1, Scenes and Dances from El sombrero de tres picos, is an orchestral extraction of the principal dances from Part I of the 1919 ballet. Musically the suite condenses the ballet’s Andalusian...

Manuel de Falla’s El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) is a Ballet in 2 Acts based on Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s novella and commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. It was created in collaboration with...

Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show) is a one-act puppet-opera with prologue and epilogue, set to a Spanish libretto drawn from Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The score is compact—about 27...

Luigi Dallapiccola’s Sicut Umbra (“Like a Shadow”) is a twelve-tone cantata for mezzo‑soprano and twelve instruments, set to poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez and composed in 1970. It unfolds as a single continuous span of...

Darius Milhaud’s Les Cloches, Op. 259 (“The Bells”), dates from 1946 and is a six‑movement symphonic suite adapted from his lost ballet after Edgar Allan Poe’s poem. The movements—Ouverture: Animé; Cloches...

Heitor Villa‑Lobos’s Vidapura (Missa Oratório), W155, was composed in 1919 as an expanded, orchestral version of his earlier organ‐accompanied Missa Oratória (W154) and premiered in November 1922 in Rio de Janeiro. Structured in...

Bruno Maderna’s Music of Gaity (1969) is an orchestral suite drawn from Elizabethan keyboard pieces in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, arranged for solo oboe, solo violin, and chamber orchestra and it exemplifies Maderna’s skill in...

Jacques Ibert’s Suite Élisabéthaine, composed in 1942 as incidental music for Le Songe d’une nuit d’été (Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), was published in 1945 and is structured in nine...

Arthur Bliss’s The Women of Yueh, F.166, is a five‑song cycle composed in 1923–24 and first published in 1924, setting Chinese texts by Li Po (translated by Shigeyoshi Obata). Lasting about 7½ minutes, the work unfolds without breaks,...