A rare volume dedicated entirely to scholarship on the genre of the concerto.

A comprehensive guide to the historical, analytical and interpretative issues surrounding one of the major genres of Western music.

This guide to the orchestra and orchestral life is unique in its breadth of coverage. It combinesorchestral history and repertory with a practical bias offering critical thought about the past, present and future of the orchestra. Including topics such as the art of orchestration, scorereading, conducting, international orchestras, recording, as well as consideration of what it means to be an orchestral musician, an educator, or an informed listener, it will be of interest to a wideranging readership of music historians and professional or amateur performers.

Richard Strauss is a composer much loved among audiences throughout the world, both in the opera house and the concert hall. Despite this popularity, Strauss was for many years ignored by scholars, who considered his commercial success and his continued reliance on the tonal system to be liabilities. However, the past two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in the composer. This Companion surveys the results, focusing on the principal genres, the social and historical context, and topics perennially controversial over the last century. Chapters cover Strauss's immense operatic output, the electrifying modernism of his tone poems, and his ever-popular Lieder. Controversial topics are explored, including Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich and the sexual dimension of his works. Reintroducing the composer and his music in light of recent research, the volume shows Strauss's artistic personality to be richer and much more complicated than has been previously acknowledged.

The world of Alban Berg is full of paradoxes, secrets and allusions, but he was able to handle emotional and moral issues at a distance and with profound sympathy. His unhurried, almost aristocratic attitude to life and his extreme self-criticism in professional matters resulted in an extraordinarily small musical output, but it includes towering masterpieces such as the operas Wozzeck and Lulu, and his last work, the Violin Concerto. All of Berg's substantial works are discussed in this Companion which brings together a team of experts who write from a variety of historical and critical perspectives, outlining the place of the music in the cultural history of its time and recontextualising it against the broader twentieth-century interplay of fashions, aesthetics and ideas.

A comprehensive introduction to the life, music and compositional aesthetic of Maurice Ravel.

This Companion provides a wide ranging and accessible study of one of the most individual composers of the twentieth century. A team of international scholars shed new light on Tippett's major works and draw attention to those that have not yet received the attention they deserve.