REPRINT SERIES Ottorino Respighi's Burlesca for Orchestra, P. 59, composed in 1906, is an exuberant and vibrant work that exemplifies the composer's early exploration of orchestral color and rhythm. Written during a period when Respighi was refining his...

The Symphony in E minor is the first symphony written by the American composer Florence Price. The work was completed in 1932 and was Price's first full-scale orchestral composition and the first symphony by a Black woman to be performed by a major...

Partita is the work with which Dallapiccola first came to international recognition. Written in memory of the Italian pianist Ernesto Consolo, it is scored in four movements for orchestra, with a soprano solo in the final movement. In a manner analogous...

Vaughan Williams composed three Norfolk Rhapsodies in 1905 and 1906, basing them on folk tunes he had collected around the Wash. But only the first of them has remained in the repertory, relished as one of the composer's fondest and most ravishing...

REPRINT SERIES With a rumble of timpani and raw strokes of open strings, the Overture begins with a blazing Allegro. The strings take off in running figures punctuated by brass blasts and woodwind interjections. Even when the orchestra suddenly drops...

Sunset Boulevard was nominated for eleven Oscars, winning 3 of them, for Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction and Waxman's score for Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. In 2005, Waxman’s score was listed as among the twenty-five most...

This orchestral arrangement of Chopin’s piano music was one of a pair commissioned from Stravinsky by Diaghilev as part of Les Sylphides for performances by the Ballets Russes at the spectacular first saison russe of opera and ballet at the...

REPRINT SERIES  Stravinsky wrote the symphony from 1942–45 on commission by the Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York. It was premièred by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Stravinsky on January 24, 1946.The Symphony in...

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,...

REPRINT SERIES  Villa-Lobos own transcription from Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier" for Orchestra of Cellos. It includes the following movements: Prelude XXIIFugue VPrelude XIVFugue IPrelude XIIIFugue VIIIFugue XXI  

In the words of the composer, The Sinfonietta was written on board the S.S. Christoforo Coloumbo en route from New York to Europe. I was going to Europe for a conducting tour which included an appearance with Radio Symphony Orchestra in Zurich,...

REPRINT SERIES The Partita dates from 1955, after Bacewicz had recovered from a serious car accident in the fall of 1954 that led to a lengthy hospital stay. The neoclassical traits apparent in her earlier work gave way to a distinctly “innovatory...

REPRINT SERIESProkofiev's Symphony No. 1 (1916-17) represents the composer's earliest mature effort in a genre he returned to time and again for the remainder of his career. Though the symphony received a warm reception in Russia and abroad -- and...

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...

REPRINT SERIES The origins of this piece can be traced back to an incident that occurred during a rehearsal at the inaugural Aspen Festival in 1950, when Stravinsky was displeased by a surprise rendition of "Happy Birthday to You", a song with which he...

REPRINT SERIES  The Symphony was written between 1938 and 1940 on a commission from American philanthropist Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. It was a turbulent period of the composer's life, marked by illness and deaths in his immediate family. In 1937,...

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...

The Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Op. 65, by Dmitri Shostakovich was written in the summer of 1943, and first performed on 4 November of that year by the USSR Symphony Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky, to whom the work is dedicated. It briefly was...