Le Bœuf sur le toit (literally "the ox on the roof"), Op. 58 is a short piece for small orchestra by the composer Darius Milhaud, written in 1919–20. Milhaud conceived the piece as incidental music for any one of the comic silent films of...

REPRINT SERIES Agon is a 22-minute ballet for twelve dancers with music by Igor Stravinsky. It was choreographed by George Balanchine. The composition's long gestation period covers an interesting juncture in Stravinsky's composing career, in which he...

REPRINT SERIES Orpheus is a thirty-minute neoclassical ballet in three tableaux composed by Igor Stravinsky in collaboration with choreographer George Balanchine. The score is among Stravinsky's most melodious. The original cast consisted of 30...

The music derives from Prokofiev's opera The Fiery Angel, a touching love story set against the backdrop of demonic possession.This opera had been accepted for performance in the 1927–28 season at the Berlin State Opera by Bruno Walter, but this...

REPRINT SERIES The Gloria by Francis Poulenc, FP 177, scored for soprano solo, large orchestra, and chorus, is a setting of the Gloria text from the mass ordinary. One of Poulenc's most celebrated works, it was commissioned by the Koussevitsky...

REPRINT SERIES The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or Firemen's Parade on Main Street, is a short composition by American composer Charles Ives. This revised orchestrated version premiered in 1934 and is scored for a chamber orchestra, consisting of a flute,...

REPRINT SERIES This is the 1947 Revised Version, as scored by the composer. Petrushka is a ballet and orchestral concert work by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1911 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company;...

"Specter of the Rose" is a 1946 film noir thriller written and directed by Ben Hecht. It stars Judith Anderson, Ivan Kirov, Viola Essen, Michael Chekhov, and Lionel Stander, with choreography by Tamara Geva, and music by George Antheil.

REPRINT SERIES Prokofiev wrote his Symphony No. 2 in D minor, Op. 40, in Paris in 1924-25, during what he called "nine months of frenzied toil". He characterized this symphony as a work of "iron and steel". Prokofiev modeled the symphony's structure on...

REPRINT SERIES The Scherzo à la russe was first conceived as a work for film use, as it was intended to be featured in The North Star. When the film project was aborted,he arranged this symphonic version in 1945. The defining characteristics of...

Cassazione, Op. 6, is an orchestral composition by Jean Sibelius, composed in 1904 for the programme that introduced his Violin Concerto. Its title refers to the cassation, a genre similar to the serenade, which was popular in the late 18th century...

REPRINT SERIES  As admirers of Kodály are aware, the composer was well known for his work in ethnomusicology. The Peacock Variations falls into this vast realm of the composer's output, using a melody that has Hungarian and possibly Mari...

REPRINT SERIES   After he departed the Soviet Union in 1918, Sergei Prokofiev (1891 - 1953) spent a fair amount of time in the U.S. concertizing. On one such tour in 1930, the Library of Congress commissioned him to compose a string quartet; the...

The Pulcinella Suite, derived from the ballet, was written in 1922 and has no vocal parts. Pulcinella marked the beginning of Stravinsky's second phase as a composer, his neoclassical period. The suite consists of eight...

REPRINT SERIES Concerto in D ("Basle") for string orchestra was composed in Hollywood between the beginning of 1946 and 8 August of the same year in response to a 1946 commission from Paul Sacher to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Basler...

REPRINT SERIES Fountains of Rome or Fontane di Roma is a symphonic poem written by Ottorino Respighi in 1916 and first published in 1918. It is the first orchestral work in his "Roman trilogy", followed by Pines of Rome (1924) and Roman Festivals (1928)...

Respighi composed Metamorphoseon in 1930, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and it is in fact something of a concerto for orchestra. The 30-minute long work consists of a theme and twelve variations or 'modes', an allusion to...