Alvorada na floresta tropical W513 was commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra and written in 1953. In form it is an overture whose performances take eight to eleven minutes.Its form is predictable, though the music itself is anything but. Hushed...

REPRINT SERIES Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4 is actually two works, both using material created for The Prodigal Son ballet. The first, Op. 47, was completed in 1930 and premiered that November; it lasts about 22 minutes. The second, Op. 112, is too...

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

Les aventures du roi Pausole (The adventures of King Pausole) is an opérette in three acts with music by Arthur Honegger and a French libretto by Albert Willemetz, based on the 1901 novel by Pierre Louÿs. It was Honegger's third operatic...

REPRINT SERIES Rawsthorne’s perky Street Corner Overture (1944), evokes, in the composer’s words, "a Saturday night at the crossroads of a busy industrial town". This is a bubbling, infectious piece and it’s all great fun.  

Job: A Masque for Dancing is a one-act ballet produced in 1931. The scenario is by Geoffrey Keynes, the choreography by Ninette de Valois, and the music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The ballet is based on the Book of Job from the Hebrew Bible and was...

REPRINT SERIES With its evocative pastoral opening, A Severn Rhapsody which was clearly written under thrall of George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad and Bridge’s Summer. Blue skies, birdsong, sunny fields, cool coppices and shaded brooks...

It is fair to say that Szymanowski’s First Symphony (1906–07) was something of a reverse in his creative fortunes and is best regarded as a flawed if valiant attempt to write on a larger orchestral scale. The pre-eminent writer on...

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The scenario of Martinu’s 1930 “Echec du Roi” (Checkmate) anticipates that of Stravinsky’s “Jeu de Cartes” (1937), with dancing chessmen taking the place of dancing poker chips. The score mixes Stravinskyan...

Prokofiev extracted an orchestral suite from the On The Dnieper Op. 51, using six of its twelve movements. This Symphonic Suite is sometimes identified as Op.51a or Op.51bis depending on the catalog, but it's the same work. On the Dnieper (На Днепре),...

The soundtrack of the 1927 film Napoléon, directed by Abel Gance, was the first film soundtrack ever composed. Published in 1927, Honegger made a selection of movements from the soundtrack of the silent movie Napoléon, and presented it as a...

Villa-Lobos composed his Ninth Symphony in Rio de Janeiro in 1952. It was first performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy. The score is dedicated to Mindinha (Arminda Neves d'Almeida), the composer's companion for the last 23...

Sergei Prokofiev's Symphonic Song (Russian: Симфоническая песнь), Op. 57, was written in 1933. It's a work demonstrating Prokofiev's transition from Parisian modernism to Soviet lyricism. Prokofiev had described of it as "a serious piece of work, and I...

REPRINT SERIES The Variazioni sinfoniche evidently won the approval of Rimsky-Korsakov, to the extent that he accepted Respighi as a student. The work consists of a number of passacaglia-like variations after the manner of Brahms or Franck.

REPRINT SERIES The large collection of rocky islands in the Baltic off Stockholm, known as the "Skerries" in English, inspired special affection in Alfvén, who spent many fine days there in his youth. In 1903, after writing Midsummer Vigil, the...