Luigi Dallapiccola’s Commiato (1972) is a masterful example of the composer’s late style, blending his deep engagement with serial techniques and his fascination with literary expression. Scored for soprano and a chamber ensemble of 15...

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Suite No. 1 for Jazz Orchestra, often referred to as the Jazz Suite No. 1, is a lighthearted and vibrant composition that blends classical sophistication with elements of jazz and popular music. Written in 1934, the suite was...

Bruno Maderna's edition and revision of Antonio Vivaldi's Beatus Vir represents a compelling intersection of Baroque sensibilities and 20th-century musicological insight. Vivaldi's original composition, a grand psalm setting for choir, soloists, and...

Partita is the work with which Dallapiccola first came to international recognition. Written in memory of the Italian pianist Ernesto Consolo, it is scored in four movements for orchestra, with a soprano solo in the final movement. In a manner analogous...

“To orchestrate is like a thumbprint. I can’t understand having someone else do it. It would be like someone putting color to your paintings.” Musically precocious, Bernard Herrmann (b. 1911, New York City; d.1975, North Hollywood)...

i) Fanfare to precede the National Anthem in G ii) The right of the Line iii) Fanfare for Princess Anne iv) High Sheriff's Fanfare v) A Salute to painting vi) Research Fanfare vii) Peace Fanfare for children viii) Let the People Sing

Sunset Boulevard was nominated for eleven Oscars, winning 3 of them, for Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction and Waxman's score for Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. In 2005, Waxman’s score was listed as among the twenty-five most...

The symphony is a short (about 20 minutes) experimental work in one movement; within this movement are four sections, the last of which includes a chorus. In a marked departure from his First Symphony, Shostakovich composed his Second in a gestural,...

 Luigi Dallapiccola was spurred to write his Tartiniana seconda, for violin accompanied by either piano or orchestra, by violinist Sandro Materassi; hoping for a sequel to Dallapiccola's well-received first Tartiniana, Materassi came to him with...

Coastal Command is a 1942 British film made by the Crown Film Unit for the Ministry of Information. The film, distributed by RKO, dramatised the work of RAF Coastal Command.Coastal Command is a documentary-style account of the Short Sunderland and...

 Carmen Fantasie is a virtuoso showpiece for violin and orchestra. The piece is part of Franz Waxman's score to the 1946 movie Humoresque for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. The...

Herrmann, for all his Angst, was a New Yorker born and bred. His Sinfonietta was composed in 1936, just before his film career took off. It contains what Steven Smith, Herrmann's biographer, describes as ''a quality dissonant Interlude''. Many years...

While Shostakovich wrote this piece as his graduation exercise from Maximilian Steinberg's composition class, some of the material may have dated from considerably earlier. The immediate parallel to the 19-year-old composer presenting his first symphony...

The Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Op. 65, by Dmitri Shostakovich was written in the summer of 1943, and first performed on 4 November of that year by the USSR Symphony Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky, to whom the work is dedicated. It briefly was...

Five Tudor Portraits (1935), by Ralph Vaughan Williams, is a work scored for contralto (or mezzo-soprano), baritone, mixed chorus and orchestra. It sets several poems, or extracts from poems, by the 15th/16th-century poet John Skelton, portraying five...

Three-movement work composed for the Festival Of Israel, 1972.