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 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.  

REPRINT SERIES  Composed in 1965, the Divertimento was written on commission from conductor Karol Teutsch. It was also he, together with the National Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra led by him, who gave its premie re performance at a concert on 21...

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REPRINT SERIES This exceptional triple concerto was utterly lost and forgotten for 30 years when its posthumous premiere revealed it as a missing masterpiece by one of the most individual and important composers of the twentieth century. Its style is...

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.

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...

First composed between 1897-1898, it was premiered in April 1901 and is considered one of Vaughan William's earliest orchestral works. This attractive work already shows evidence of the composer's emerging musical style and sure grasp of orchestral...

REPRINT SERIES Also known as Suite for Strings P.41, it is divided in 6 movements: 1. Ciaccona, 2. Siciliana, 3. Giga, 4. Sarabanda, 5. Burlesca, 6. Rigaudon

Finzi wrote incidental music for a BBC broadcast of the Shakespeare's play in 1946, reworked it for a special stage presentation in 1952, and finally extracted a 10-number suite for small orchestra. The  most important of these, in Finzi's view, are...