Scores for Orchestra

Composed by Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835) in 1830, the two-act opera I Capuletti e i Montecchi (The Capulets and the Mantagues) stands as one of only two successful opera adaptations of Shakespeare's R...

Premiering on May 22, 1813, at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice, L'italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers) by Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) was a success, with subsequent performances in Vi...

Edward Elgar's (1857-1934) Symphony No. 1 in A-flat, Op. 55 was completed in 1908, although it was a work about a decade in the making. Originally proposed as early as 1898 as a programmatic work base...

Originally written for piano four hands in 1879, Hungarian Dances (WoO 1), a set of 21 lively dance tunes mostly based on Hungarian themes, are among Johannes Brahms' (1833-1897) most popular works to...

The first performance of I Vespri Siciliani (The Sicilian Vespers), a five-act opera by Guiseppe Verdi (1813-1901), took place at the Paris Opera on June 13, 1855, under the direction of Narcisse Gira...

Manon Lescaut, the third opera and first notable success of Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), took shape between 1889 and 1892. Five different writers worked on its libretto. The Teatro Regio in Turin saw...

The ROMANCE in F minor, Op. 11 (B. 39) was composed by Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904) in 1877, reworked from the Andantino movement of his 1873 STRING QUARTET NO. 5 in F minor, a work written before he wa...

Cellist and composer David Popper published the CELLO CONCERTO No. 5 in C major, Hob. VIIb:5, in 1899 as a completion of stetches supposedly made by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). Due to more recent...

The ballet THE SEASONS (LES SAISONS), Op. 67 was composed by Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936) for famous choreographer Marius Petipa in 1899. Originally intended to be written by Glazunov's friend Ricca...

The ballet THE SEASONS (LES SAISONS), Op. 67 was composed by Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936) for famous choreographer Marius Petipa in 1899. Originally intended to be written by Glazunov's friend Ricca...

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) composed SONGS TO POEMS BY RUECKERT (SONGS AFTER RÜCKERT; RÜCKERT-LIEDER) between 1901 and 1902. They were not conceived of as a cycle, with each song only connected by the p...

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) began composing the songs of DES KNABEN WUNDERHORN (THE BOY'S MAGIC HORN) in 1892, finishing in 1901. Comprised of 15 songs total by the end, each sets folktale texts, as pub...

Spring Song, Op. 16 (Vårsång) was written in 1894 by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and was initially titled Improvisation for Orchestra. Sibelius revised the single-movement tone poem a year later and ret...

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) composed FOUR CHARACTERISTIC WALTZES, Op. 22 in 1899. Full of wonderful orchestral colors and rhythmic vitality, each of the four waltzes showcases varied scenes. M...

While librettist W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) and composer Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) had worked previously in 1871-72 to write Thespis, a work for the Christmas season, the 1875 one-act comic opera Tria...

HOLOUBEK (THE WILD DOVE), Op. 110/B. 198, is an orchestra poem composed by Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904) in 1896. Revised in January of the next year, it tells the story of a woman who poisons her husban...

In 1896, soon after his return from America to his Bohemian homeland, Antonín Dvorák wrote a set of four orchestral pieces based on Karel Jaromír Erben's collection of poetry A BOUQUET OF FOLK LEGENDS...

Gianni Schicchi is a one-act comic opera by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924). The final and most popular opera in a trio known as Il trittico (The Triptych), each one dealing with the concealment of a deat...

In 1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) succeeded Christoph Gluck as the chamber composer for Joseph II. One of his principal tasks was to write music for the dances and balls that took place in...

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) wrote his four movement AFRICAN SUITE for piano in 1898, two years after the success of his BALLADE in A minor, as a result of meeting African-American poet Paul La...

In the summer of 1912, Mariya Danilova, a cello student at the Moscow Conservatory, stumbled across Konstantin Balmont's idiosyncratic, Russian translation of the poem THE BELLS by Edgar Allan Poe. Fe...

The Suite Algérienne, Op. 60, sparked by a trip that Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) took to Algeria in 1873, debuted in Paris in December 1880 with Edouard Colonne conducting. For the rest of his lif...

J.S. Bach (1685-1750) wrote the secular 'Hunting Cantata' (Jagdkantate) in 1713 for the occasion of Duke Christian von Sachsen-Weisenfels birthday. Sachsen-Weisenfels, a passionate hunter. The full ti...

In March of 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) composed the concert aria PER QUESTA BELLA MANO, K. 612, shortly before beginning work on THE MAGIC FLUTE. It is known for its double bass part, n...

Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) wrote his CONCERTO FOR PIANO No. 3 in B minor, OP. 89 in 1819. Similar to his second piano concerto, it is composed in a proto-Romantic style that anticipated later c...