In 1919 the premiere of Le Bestiaire on poems by Guillaume Apollinaire (with Suzanne Peignot, friend and first interpreter of the composer’s mélodies). 6 movements: I. Le dromadaire II. Le chèvre du Thibet III. La sauterelle IV...

Perhaps one of Finzi's finest compositions, this pacifist masterpiece is all too rarely performed. The beautiful music, scored for tenor and small orchestra, was composed over a span of about 20 years from the 1920s to 1944, as memories and realities...

REPRINT SERIES Litanies à la Vierge noire (French pronunciation: ​[litani a la vjɛʁʒ nwɑʁ]; "Litany to the Black Virgin"), FP 82, is a piece of sacred music composed by Francis Poulenc in 1936 for a three-part choir of women (or children) and...

The suite begins where the opera starts, famously, with the bold, erotic horn music that is "Der Rosenkavalier’s" calling card and always a welcome sound to opera lovers. The suite begins with the opera's orchestral prelude, depicting the night of...

REPRINT SERIES L'enfant et les sortilèges: Fantaisie lyrique en deux parties (The Child and the Spells: A Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts) is an opera in one act, with music by Maurice Ravel to a libretto by Colette. It is Ravel's second opera, his...

Gliere's Concerto for Coloratura Soprano and Orchestra in F minor Op.82 , composed in 1943, is an innovative work that features the soprano as the main instrument, but without words. Divided in two movements, the first Andante is filled with melancholy...

Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14 is a song by Sergei Rachmaninoff, published in 1912 as the last of his Fourteen Songs, Op. 34. Originally written for voice (soprano or tenor) with piano accompaniment, it contains no words, but is sung using any one vowel (of...

Franz Schubert composed his Lied, "Der Erlkönig" (also known as "Le Roi des Aulnes"), for solo voice and piano in 1815, setting text from the Goethe poem.  It was later orchestrated by Hector Berlioz. The four characters in the song —...