Faber Music

In Three Studies from Couperin, Thomas Adès empathetically reworks three pieces by the Baroque composer into music that is distinctively Adès without dismissing the source material. The basic structur...

When the writer Fernando Pessoa died in in Lisbon in 1935, he left behind a large trunk full of poetry, horoscopes, unfinished stories, essays, plays, translations, letters and journals, typed, handwr...

Since its premiere in 1885 at the Savoy Theatre in London, The Mikado (or The Town of Titipu) has become one of the most-performed pieces of musical theatre in history. As with many of Gilbert and Sul...

W. S. Gilbert's complete libretto for H. M. S Pinafore, which opened May 28, 1878, at the Opera Comique and ran for 571 performances. Subtitled 'The Lass That Loved A Sailor', the story concerns a cap...

. . . arguably the most spectacular orchestral writing heard in any opera of the past half a century. For mastery of texture, color and invention, Mr. Anderson sets standards. . . a triumph of sustain...

After a period of intense work and isolation for Benjamin, his much-awaited new opera, Written on Skin, was premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival on 7 July 2012. A long standing ovation was the fi...

Drake's libretto deftly weaves together a wide variety of texts, from actual communications sent on the morning of 9/11 to passages from the Latin Requiem Mass.

A turning point for Adès and, it felt, for opera itself. ' The Observer (Fiona Maddocks), 31 July 2016 'Some of Adès's most powerful orchestral writing. . . The music is constantly fascinating. . . Ca...

Inspired by the fast-moving scenes and vulnerable, complex characters of Elizabethan drama, this new opera by George Benjamin and Martin Crimp considers what space, if any, exists for love and human a...

Instrumentation: perc(4): 3 gong/cel/vib/glsp/mar/5 bongo/timb/congas/timp/5 tom-t/BD/4 cencerro/3 tgl/musical saw/glasschimes/wood chimes/2 tam-t/3 susp.cym/4 tpl.bl/crot -harp - strings

Instrumentation: 2.picc.3.3.2.cbsn - 4431 - timp - perc(3): SD/cyms/BD- harp - strings or 2.2.2.1.cbsn - 4231 - timp - perc(2): SD/cyms/BD -strings

Instrumentation: 2.picc.2.2.2 - 4331 - timp - perc(2): cyms/BD/SD/tam-t/glsp/tamb/xyl/cast - harp - strings

Benjamin Britten wrote his 'String Quartet in F' in April 1928, shortly after he began lessons with Frank Bridge. He was fourteen at the time and it is thought that this piece was set as a homework ex...

The sources for this new edition of Britten's String Quartet No.3 was the original manuscript, a photocopy of the manuscript in progress, Rosamund Strode's fair copy. The Quartet was written for the A...

The writing of a string quartet seems to me to accompany a period in my life of intense personal and musical crisis, upheaval and change. Such were the circumstances which immediately preceded the com...

The writing of a string quartet seems to me to accompany a period in my life of intense personal and musical crisis, upheaval and change. Such were the circumstances which immediately preceded the com...

The living, indigenous musics of Kakadu National Park, in the north of Australia, and of Torres Strait and beyond, have been a part of my musical language since the late ‘eighties. The incorporation i...

In the first place, Autumn Song was a short work for SATB chorus, written in 1968. The words, by Roger Covell, sing of an autumnal Australian landscape still recovering from the devastation caused by...