In 1919 the premiere of Le Bestiaire on poems by Guillaume Apollinaire (with Suzanne Peignot, friend and first interpreter of the composer’s mélodies). 6 movements: I. Le dromadaire II. Le chèvre du Thibet III. La sauterelle IV...

REPRINT SERIES The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or Firemen's Parade on Main Street, is a short composition by American composer Charles Ives. This revised orchestrated version premiered in 1934 and is scored for a chamber orchestra, consisting of a flute,...

REPRINT SERIES This is the 1947 Revised Version, as scored by the composer. Petrushka is a ballet and orchestral concert work by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1911 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company;...

REPRINT SERIES About half of Praeludium was composed in Paris, the remainder having been worked out during one of Stravinsky's trips to the United States in early 1937. With a work as concise and polished as this one, however, it is difficult to discern...

Perhaps one of Finzi's finest compositions, this pacifist masterpiece is all too rarely performed. The beautiful music, scored for tenor and small orchestra, was composed over a span of about 20 years from the 1920s to 1944, as memories and realities...

REPRINT SERIES Litanies à la Vierge noire (French pronunciation: ​[litani a la vjɛʁʒ nwɑʁ]; "Litany to the Black Virgin"), FP 82, is a piece of sacred music composed by Francis Poulenc in 1936 for a three-part choir of women (or children) and...

REPRINT SERIES Prokofiev wrote his Symphony No. 2 in D minor, Op. 40, in Paris in 1924-25, during what he called "nine months of frenzied toil". He characterized this symphony as a work of "iron and steel". Prokofiev modeled the symphony's structure on...

Highly passionate in character and rich in its melodic invention, Finzi’s writing here is characteristically open-hearted and approachable. From the stillness of the opening, the music unfolds, reaching a peak of intensity before returning to its...

REPRINT SERIES  As admirers of Kodály are aware, the composer was well known for his work in ethnomusicology. The Peacock Variations falls into this vast realm of the composer's output, using a melody that has Hungarian and possibly Mari...

Finzi, who constantly revised his own work, could not bring himself to rest contentedly with the outer movements of his Violin Concerto. However, the central section became established during the composer’s lifetime as a piece in its own right. It...

REPRINT SERIES Finzi's Prelude for String Orchestra Op.25, was originally conceived in the 1920s as the opening movement of a (subsequently uncompleted) chamber symphony, to be entitled The Bud, the Blossom and the Berry, the Prelude nevertheless stands...

REPRINT SERIES   After he departed the Soviet Union in 1918, Sergei Prokofiev (1891 - 1953) spent a fair amount of time in the U.S. concertizing. On one such tour in 1930, the Library of Congress commissioned him to compose a string quartet; the...

REPRINT SERIES This concerto came about because of Szymanowski’s long-standing partnership with the legendary violinist Paweł Kochański, who’d previously collaborated with him on his D Minor Violin Sonata and then on his first Violin...

The Interlude for oboe and strings was composed during the mid 1930s, originally for string quartet; later Finzi created an expanded instrumentation for string orchestra as an alternative. It is a 13-minute work of considerable substance,...

REPRINT SERIES Ionisation (1929–1931) is a musical composition by Edgard Varèse written for thirteen percussionists. It was among the first concert hall compositions for percussion ensemble alone, although Alexander Tcherepnin had composed...

The Pulcinella Suite, derived from the ballet, was written in 1922 and has no vocal parts. Pulcinella marked the beginning of Stravinsky's second phase as a composer, his neoclassical period. The suite consists of eight...

REPRINT SERIES In 1940, at the suggestion of his publisher and agent, Heinsheimer, Bartók orchestrated his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion as Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra. The parts for the four soloists were essentially...

REPRINT SERIES Fountains of Rome or Fontane di Roma is a symphonic poem written by Ottorino Respighi in 1916 and first published in 1918. It is the first orchestral work in his "Roman trilogy", followed by Pines of Rome (1924) and Roman Festivals (1928)...