REPRINT SERIES The concerto was composed in 1954 in Rio de Janeiro. It was commissioned by Felicja Blumental, to whom the score is dedicated, and who gave the first performance at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 8 May 1955, with the London...

La voix humaine (English: The Human Voice) is a forty-minute, one-act opera for soprano and orchestra composed by Francis Poulenc in 1958. The work is based on the play of the same name by Jean Cocteau, who, along with French soprano Denise Duval, worked...

REPRINT SERIES Respighi's "Toccata" for Piano and Orchestra is in effect a continuous piano concerto, lasting about 25 minutes, that owes much to the composer's love of older Italian masters such as Vivaldi, Corelli and Marcello. The work has been...

A dazzling percussion concerto that requires advanced technique and musicality, from timpani to xylophone to small percussion instruments. This work is often taken up as a challenge for competitions.

In this engaging work Vaughan Williams takes advantage of the expressive possibilities of the cello, ranging from wistful and melancholic to lively and jovial. It was composed in 1929 and premiered the following year by its dedicatee, the legendary...

REPRINT SERIES Poulenc's Concert Champêtre for Harpsichord (or Piano) and Orchestra was written in 1927–28 for the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska who said she "adored" playing it as it made her "insouciant and gay!" Landowska was responsible...

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...

REPRINT SERIES There are plentiful ingredients in Respighi’s Piano Concerto in A minor. Rhapsodic flourishes, triumphal declamations, huge, dense chords and passages of lyrical contemplation. Written in 1902, when he was in his early twenties, it...

Certainly Prokofiev’s own ‘stories’ for children end happily – and there are quite a number, not merely those recorded here. The first was The Ugly Duckling, a setting of an adaptation (by Nina Meshchersky, Prokofiev’s first...

One of Milhaud's most well known pieces is 'Scaramouche'. Original written as a Suite for two pianos but later transcribed by the composer for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra. The original conception for the Scaramouche suite was for piano duo, and Milhaud...

REPRINT SERIES The Suite for Viola and Orchestra (also called Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra) by Ralph Vaughan Williams is a work in eight movements for solo viola and orchestra composed in 1933 and 1934. The work consists of eight movements,...

REPRINT SERIES Of a length of about 16 minutes, it involves 3 movements, thus presented by the composer: – I – Andante and scherzo All resources of the instrument are enhanced from this first time, virtuosity, sonorities, expression. The...

REPRINT SERIES The Viola Concerto in A minor, Sz. 120, BB 128 (also known as Concerto for Viola and Orchestra) was one of the last pieces written by Béla Bartók. He began composing his viola concerto while living in Saranac Lake, New York,...

REPRINT SERIES Igor Stravinsky's Violin Concerto in D is a neoclassical violin concerto in four movements, composed in the summer of 1931 and premiered on October 23, 1931. It lasts approximately twenty minutes.  It was used by George Balanchine as...

The last phase of Finzi’s output following the 2nd World War saw a series of larger scale works culminating in the completion of the Cello Concerto, the work which dominated his final year and was first broadcast on the night before his death in...

Korngold - Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra in C Major, Op.37 This romantic and dramatic score is actually a single-movement, thirteen-minute piece for cello and orchestra written to be played in a film called Deception, about a love triangle...

Poulenc: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in C-Sharp minor FP 146I. AllegrettoII. Andante con motoIII. Rondeau à la française   Although cast in three movements, it is a world away from the classical concerto. This is largely on...