Luigi Dallapiccola was spurred to write his Tartiniana seconda, for violin accompanied by either piano or orchestra, by violinist Sandro Materassi; hoping for a sequel to Dallapiccola's well-received first Tartiniana, Materassi came to him with...

REPRINT SERIES Capriccio for ten instrumentsfor flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, harp, two violins, viola, and cello

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...

God is gone up is the second of his three opus 27 anthems. It was written in 1951 for a St Cecilia's Day Service at St Sepulchre's Church in Holborn. This well-written anthem of praise, which, like Bairstow's works, stretches the organ's resources,...

REPRINT SERIES British oboist Léon Goossens (1897-1988) is credited with reestablishing the oboe as a solo instrument and elevating its status after it fell out of favor in the nineteenth century. Romantic composers preferred the facility and...

 Carmen Fantasie is a virtuoso showpiece for violin and orchestra. The piece is part of Franz Waxman's score to the 1946 movie Humoresque for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. The...

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...

Herrmann, for all his Angst, was a New Yorker born and bred. His Sinfonietta was composed in 1936, just before his film career took off. It contains what Steven Smith, Herrmann's biographer, describes as ''a quality dissonant Interlude''. Many years...

Following the composition of Five Mystical Songs in 1911, Vaughan Williams began to compose a smaller scale piece, which was completed in 1914. However, World War I delayed the presentation of the song cycle until 1920. In setting the four hymns to...

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...

REPRINT SERIES  Though not readily associated with Anglican church music (despite being fully aware of its repertoire), Elgar composed two major extended anthems. The first—Great is the Lord, Op 67, a substantial multi-sectional work, begun...

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...

 Alvorada na floresta tropical W513 was commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra and written in 1953. In form it is an overture whose performances take eight to eleven minutes.Its form is predictable, though the music itself is anything but. Hushed...

REPRINT SERIES Composed between 1936 and 1937, Rawthorne's Clarinet Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra lasts around 19 minutes and has 4 movements: 1. Preludio2. Capriccio3. Aria4. Invention

Five Tudor Portraits (1935), by Ralph Vaughan Williams, is a work scored for contralto (or mezzo-soprano), baritone, mixed chorus and orchestra. It sets several poems, or extracts from poems, by the 15th/16th-century poet John Skelton, portraying five...

Igor Stravinsky composed his Mass between 1944 and 1948. This 19-minute setting of the Roman Catholic Mass exhibits the austere, Neoclassic, anti-Romantic aesthetic that characterizes his work from about 1923 to 1951. The Mass also represents one of only...

REPRINT SERIES Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4 is actually two works, both using material created for The Prodigal Son ballet. The first, Op. 47, was completed in 1930 and premiered that November; it lasts about 22 minutes. The second, Op. 112, is too...