Bruno Maderna's edition and revision of Antonio Vivaldi's Beatus Vir represents a compelling intersection of Baroque sensibilities and 20th-century musicological insight. Vivaldi's original composition, a grand psalm setting for choir, soloists, and...

“To orchestrate is like a thumbprint. I can’t understand having someone else do it. It would be like someone putting color to your paintings.” Musically precocious, Bernard Herrmann (b. 1911, New York City; d.1975, North Hollywood)...

The symphony is a short (about 20 minutes) experimental work in one movement; within this movement are four sections, the last of which includes a chorus. In a marked departure from his First Symphony, Shostakovich composed his Second in a gestural,...

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...

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...

Alan Rawsthorne's First Symphony is a thunderous, bounding, jagged affair, relieved by quieter moments of irony.

The soundtrack of the 1927 film Napoléon, directed by Abel Gance, was the first film soundtrack ever composed. Published in 1927, Honegger made a selection of movements from the soundtrack of the silent movie Napoléon, and presented it as a...

Milhaud’s Service sacré  for baritone (cantor), narrator, mixed chorus and organ or orchestra is one of the few authentic masterpieces of twentieth century liturgical music. Composed in 1947 for San Francisco’s Temple Emanu-El, it...

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...

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.

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...

Le Bœuf sur le toit (literally "the ox on the roof"), Op. 58 is a short piece for small orchestra by the composer Darius Milhaud, written in 1919–20. Milhaud conceived the piece as incidental music for any one of the comic silent films of...