REPRINT SERIESProkofiev's Symphony No. 1 (1916-17) represents the composer's earliest mature effort in a genre he returned to time and again for the remainder of his career. Though the symphony received a warm reception in Russia and abroad -- and...

 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...

REPRINT SERIES British oboist Léon Goossens (1897-1988) is credited with reestablishing the oboe as a solo instrument and elevating its status after it fell out of favor in the nineteenth century. Romantic composers preferred the facility and...

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...

Following the composition of Five Mystical Songs in 1911, Vaughan Williams began to compose a smaller scale piece, which was completed in 1914. However, World War I delayed the presentation of the song cycle until 1920. In setting the four hymns to...

REPRINT SERIES  Though not readily associated with Anglican church music (despite being fully aware of its repertoire), Elgar composed two major extended anthems. The first—Great is the Lord, Op 67, a substantial multi-sectional work, begun...

 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...

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

An Oxford Elegy is a work for narrator, small mixed chorus and small orchestra, written by Ralph Vaughan Williams between 1947 and 1949. It uses portions of two poems by Matthew Arnold, "The Scholar Gipsy" and "Thyrsis". The first performance took place...

REPRINT SERIES The text to both songs comes from one of Prokofiev's favorite poets, Konstantin Balmont. The two choruses in this set were entitled "The White Swan" and "The Wave." The former was premiered in 1910, with the composer conducting a...

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  

In 1955, Heitor Villa-Lobos was commissioned by John Sebastian to write a harmonica concerto, and the piece was premiered in in Jerusalem on October 27, 1959, a month before Villa's death. Villa-Lobos was one of a number of eminent composers...

REPRINT SERIES Composed during the Second World War (most of it at a Budapest monastery) and completed in 1944, Missa Brevis was first performed in 1945, just after the end of the war, at the Budapest Opera House (where Kodály and his wife had...

The concerto was premiered on 26 November 1938 in Moscow by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra. Alexander Melik-Pashayev was the conductor and Lev Berezovsky played the cello.The premiere of Prokofiev's Cello Concerto (Op. 58) was generally thought to...

Renard: histoire burlesque chantée et jouée, or The Fox: burlesque tale sung and played, is a chamber opera-ballet for four male voices and 16 instrumentalists written in 1916 by Igor Stravinsky. Its original Russian text, by the composer,...

REPRINT SERIES In 1950, the Musical Arts Society of La Jolla, California, commissioned a work from Martinu that turned out to be his farewell to neoclassicism. The Musical Arts Society had requested a ‘tuneful and approachable’ orchestral...

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.