Scores for Orchestra

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...

Tzigane is a rhapsodic composition by the French composer Maurice Ravel. It was commissioned by and dedicated to Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi, great-niece of the influential violin virtuoso Jose...

Igor Strawinsky's ballet Pulcinella was written for Les Ballets Russes after the great triumph of The Firebird and the great scandal of The Rite of Spring, but it marked a new compositional direction....

Dance Suite, completed at Radvány (northern Hungary) in August 1923, was composed for a festival concert held on November 19, 1923 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the two cities of Buda and Pes...

This symphonic version of Rhapsody in Blue was written by American composer and arranger Tom Myron. It is based on Gershwin's original two piano arrangement of the piece. In this version, both the ori...

L'Arlésienne (The Woman from Arles), a play produced in 1872, was adapted from an 1868 novel by the author Alphonse Daudet. Georges Bizet (1838-1875) was commissioned to write the incidental music for...

Ferde Grofe's (1892-1972) Mississippi Suite depicts scenes along a journey down the Mississippi River, from its headwaters of Minnesota down to New Orleans. The work was composed in 1926 and first per...

Born in Venezuela, but raised in Paris, Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) was drawn early in life to fashionable salons, singing his own songs from the piano. There he mingled with such luminaries as Mallarme...

Gustav Holst (1874-1934) began composition of A Fugal Overture in 1922, completing the full score in January 1923. Despite its name, the overture is not strictly fugal. It belongs to the era of neo-cl...

Sergei Prokofjew (1891-1953) began his Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 19, as a concertino in 1915 but soon abandoned it to work on his opera, The Gambler. He returned to the concerto in the sum...

Austrian composer Alban Berg (1885-1935) composed the three-act opera Wozzeck between 1914 and 1922 after seeing a production of German playwright Georg Büchner's incomplete drama Woyzeck. Beginning t...

The overture to THE SONG OF HIAWATHA was composed in 1899 for the Norwich Triennial Musical Festival performance of HIAWATHA'S WEDDING FEAST, then published separately from any of the three Hiawatha c...

Devotion (Ab imo pectore) is the second half of Jean Sibelius' (1865-1957) Two Pieces for Violin or Cello and Orchestra, Op. 77. Completed in 1915, the first performance was held in Helsinki on March...

Béla Bartók's (1881-1945) Four Orchestra Pieces, Op. 12 premiered in January 1922 in Budapest, but did not become one of Bartók's best-known works until its popularity was revived by Pierre Boulez in...

This edition of EL AMOR BRUJO (LOVE, THE SORCERER) is the 1920-1924 revision of the 1915 version by Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (1876 - 1946). Originally a collaboration between de Falla, the fla...

Between 1917 and 1931, Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) transcribed three orchestral suites from original pieces written for lute between the 16th and 18th centuries. Antiche Danze ed Arie (Ancient Airs...

Pacific 231 is an orchestral piece by Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) intended to evoke the feelings of the composer when he witnessed a train in motion. The title of the piece refers to a specific type o...

Escales (Ports of Call) by Jacques Ibert (1890-1962) is an orchestral suite recalling his travels on his honeymoon. Its three movements are Rome-Palermo, which conjures southern Italy with tarantella...

Der Wunderbare Mandarin (The Miraculous Mandarin) is a suite adapted from Béla Bartók's (1881 -1945) pantomime ballet of the same name. The ballet was the last piece of music Bartók wrote that was int...

Part of the British folk revival of the early 20th century, Gustav Holst's (1874-1934) Somerset Rhapsody consists of his interpretations of three English folk tunes from the Somerset region: "The Shee...

Iberia was originally a suite for piano composed by Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) between 1905 to 1909, published in four books comprised of 3 movements each. Albéniz wrote these in an impressionistic sty...

Despite its greater popularity now, Béla Bartók's (1881-1945) CONCERTO FOR PIANO NO. 1 was universally panned by critics after its premiere due to its harshness; the innovative use of tone clusters as...

The Háry János Suite is derived from Zoltán Kodály's (1882-1967) 1926 comic opera. The opera tells the fantastical tale of the title character's imagination, from having the wife of Napoleon, Empress...

The Háry János Suite is derived from Zoltán Kodály's (1882-1967) 1926 comic opera. The opera tells the fantastical tale of the title character's imagination, from having the wife of Napoleon, Empress...

The Nutcracker has achieved the status of being the world's most popular and most often performed ballet. This edition, with a complete full score to accompany William McDermott's 1969 medium orchestr...