In the words of the composer, The Sinfonietta was written on board the S.S. Christoforo Coloumbo en route from New York to Europe. I was going to Europe for a conducting tour which included an appearance with Radio Symphony Orchestra in Zurich,...

REPRINT SERIES The Partita dates from 1955, after Bacewicz had recovered from a serious car accident in the fall of 1954 that led to a lengthy hospital stay. The neoclassical traits apparent in her earlier work gave way to a distinctly “innovatory...

 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...

Coastal Command is a 1942 British film made by the Crown Film Unit for the Ministry of Information. The film, distributed by RKO, dramatised the work of RAF Coastal Command.Coastal Command is a documentary-style account of the Short Sunderland 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...

While Shostakovich wrote this piece as his graduation exercise from Maximilian Steinberg's composition class, some of the material may have dated from considerably earlier. The immediate parallel to the 19-year-old composer presenting his first symphony...

 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.

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 SERIESVaughan Williams often tended to focus on the composition of works in a specific genre at certain periods in his career. In 1913, for example, he wrote incidental scores to no less than seven plays (five by Shakespeare), and in 1920 he...

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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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),...

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...