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...

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...

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...

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...

Finzi wrote incidental music for a BBC broadcast of the Shakespeare's play in 1946, reworked it for a special stage presentation in 1952, and finally extracted a 10-number suite for small orchestra. The  most important of these, in Finzi's view, are...

REPRINT SERIES Pulcinella is a 21-section ballet by Igor Stravinsky with arias for soprano, tenor and bass vocal soloists, and two sung trios. It is based on the 18th-century play Quatre Polichinelles semblables, or Four similar Pulcinellas, revolving...

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...

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...

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...

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...