Benjamin Britten’s Passacaglia, Op. 33b, is an orchestral interlude drawn from Act II of his opera Peter Grimes, Op. 33. Britten extracted it as an independent concert work shortly after the opera’s 1945 premiere, creating a companion piece...

REPRINT SERIES  Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Romance for Harmonica, Strings and Piano in D-flat major was composed in 1951 for the celebrated harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, who had commissioned new works for his instrument from a number of...

Leroy Anderson’s A Christmas Festival for Wind Band is the composer’s own concert band version of his popular Christmas overture, originally written for the Boston Pops Orchestra at the request of Arthur Fiedler in 1950. Anderson later...

REPRINT SERIES The Eclogue is the central movement of an uncompleted piano concerto, and its title was applied posthumously. Finzi revised it twice during his lifetime, and the surviving movement stands on its own as a complete concert piece rather than...

Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31, was composed in 1943 for tenor, solo horn, and string orchestra and it is one of his most distinctive early wartime works. The work was written for Peter Pears and Dennis Brain, and...

REPRINT SERIES Richard Strauss’s Enoch Arden, Op. 38, is a melodrama based on Alfred Tennyson’s poem, using Adolf Strodtmann’s German translation. In Strauss’s original form, it is written for narrator and piano and was...

Benjamin Britten’s Prelude and Fugue, Op. 29, was composed in 1943 for 18-part string orchestra, and it was written to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Boyd Neel Orchestra. It lasts about nine minutes and is a compact two-part work built...

Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs (Sieben frühe Lieder) is a cycle for high voice and orchestra that Berg assembled and orchestrated in 1928 from songs he had originally composed between 1905 and 1908, while studying with Arnold Schoenberg. The...

REPRINT SERIES  Arnold Bax’s In Memoriam (1916), GP 190, is a single-movement elegiac chamber work for cor anglais, harp, violin I, violin II, viola, and cello. It is unrelated to Bax’s orchestral In Memoriam for orchestra, and the...

Sibelius’s Suite for Violin and String Orchestra, JS 185, is a three-movement work composed in 1929 and often published as Op. 117. Its movements are Country Scenery (Allegretto), Serenade: Evening in Spring (Andantino), and In the Summer (Vivace)...

REPRINT SERIES  Ernest Bloch’s Concerto Grosso No. 2 (B.84), composed in 1952 and published by G. Schirmer in 1953, is scored for a concertino string quartet (two violins, viola, cello) against a five-part string ripieno (string orchestra)...

REPRINT SERIES  Hammersmith: Prelude and Scherzo, Op. 52, was written by Gustav Holst in 1930 as a substantial two-part work for military/wind band (Prelude and Scherzo). The wind-band premiere took place at the American Bandmasters Association...

“The Typewriter” is a novelty orchestral showpiece completed on 9 October 1950; Anderson scored it for full orchestra with a real typewriter used as a solo percussion instrument (three principal sounds: typing, the carriage return bell, and...

REPRINT SERIES  Manuel de Falla’s Spanish Dance No. 1 (Danza Española No. 1) from the opera La vida breve was arranged for full orchestra by Stéphane Chapelier in 1928. In Chapelier’s orchestration the dance functions as a...

REPRINT SERIES  Jacob Gade’s Suite d’Amour is a short orchestral suite in three connected movements—“The First Meeting,” “In Love,” and “Red Roses”—that together run about eleven minutes...

REPRINT SERIES  George Enescu’s Two Intermèdes for string orchestra, Op. 12, were written in 1902–03 as short orchestral miniatures for strings and are usually performed together as a single item. The two pieces contrast in...

REPRINT SERIES  Ravel’s setting of Clément Marot’s poem “D’Anne jouant de l’espinette” dates from 1896 as the second of his Deux épigrammes de Clément Marot (M.10), originally for voice and...

Luigi Dallapiccola’s Sicut Umbra (“Like a Shadow”) is a twelve-tone cantata for mezzo‑soprano and twelve instruments, set to poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez and composed in 1970. It unfolds as a single continuous span of...