For St. Cecilia (subtitled “Ceremonial Ode”) was commissioned by the St. Cecilia’s Day Festival Committee and premiered in the Royal Albert Hall on 22 November 1947, St. Cecilia’s Day (Cecilian works by Purcell and Handel were...

REPRINT SERIES In 1930 Ottorino Respighi composed Lauda per la Natività del Signore, the only sacred choral piece among his works. In this song of praise to the miracle of Christmas,0 majestic sounding choral passages alternate with the soloistic...

REPRINT SERIES Riders to the Sea is a short one-act opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams, based on the play of the same name by John Millington Synge. The composer completed the score in 1927, but it was not premiered until 1 December 1937, at the Royal...

ORIGINAL CHORAL VERSION 1938 Serenade to Music is an orchestral concert work completed in 1938 by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, written as a tribute to conductor Sir Henry Wood. It features an orchestra and 16 vocal soloists, with lyrics...

The accompaniment of this piece exists in two versions:A version - for strings, harp (or piano) and cymbals, which is intended for performance with a small chorus. B version - for full orchestra (instrumentation as listed above) which is the version...

REPRINT SERIES Epithalamion (which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ''A nuptial song or poem in praise of the bride and bridegroom'') is a large-scale cantata from 1957 based on Edmund Spenser's love-poem of the same name: musically, it draws...

REPRINT SERIES The Symphony of Psalms is a choral symphony in three movements composed by Igor Stravinsky in 1930 during his neoclassical period. The work was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony...

REPRINT SERIES The Gloria by Francis Poulenc, FP 177, scored for soprano solo, large orchestra, and chorus, is a setting of the Gloria text from the mass ordinary. One of Poulenc's most celebrated works, it was commissioned by the Koussevitsky...

Perhaps one of Finzi's finest compositions, this pacifist masterpiece is all too rarely performed. The beautiful music, scored for tenor and small orchestra, was composed over a span of about 20 years from the 1920s to 1944, as memories and realities...

REPRINT SERIES Litanies à la Vierge noire (French pronunciation: ​[litani a la vjɛʁʒ nwɑʁ]; "Litany to the Black Virgin"), FP 82, is a piece of sacred music composed by Francis Poulenc in 1936 for a three-part choir of women (or children) and...