2013 marks the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth and major celebrations are planned across the world, making this the widest ever global celebration of a British composer. Faber Music, which was founded and nurtured by Britten, will be marking the occasion with a series of centenary publications, including the previously unpublished 6 Early Songs. These early songs were writt en during the composer's schooldays, whilst he was studying with Frank Bridge. But even at this tender age, Britten already had such accomplished works as Quatre Chansons Francaises under his belt. The songs on the one hand display Britten's school-boyish imagination (witches, owls and moths), while on the other show a more brooding side, not to menti on confident piano writi ng and an innate understanding of vocal drama. Previously unpublished, these six songs are an important new addition to the solo song repertory.

This definitive encyclopaedic work explores the origins of percussion through the development of the early drums and xylophones right up to the wide range of modern instruments and the sounds they make. James Blades covers these early developments globally from China and the Far East, India and Tibet, the early civilisations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Persia through to mediaeval and renaissance Europe. He continues to examine the role of percussion in the classical and romantic orchestras and finally looks at the ways composers have pushed the boundaries in modern music. Each chapter has its own photographs, illustrations and bibliography and there are comprehensive indices referencing all the composers and works discussed. This extended edition includes two important new chapters. The first covers the rise of the solo percussionist and is written by the world's leading practitioner and one of Blades' former pupils, Dame Evelyn Glennie, who also contributes a new Foreword, while recent developments in orchestral percussion are covered by Neil Percy, Head of Timpani and Percussion at the Royal Academy of Music and Principal Percussionist of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Jubilate Deo, in the key of E for mixed voices with organ accompaniment, is the lesser known of Benjamin Britten's settings of Psalm 100, and was intended as a companion piece to the Te Deum in C, and is an exuberant, joyful sing. The piece remained unpublished until after Britten's death. Purchase the sheet music arranged for accompanied mixed voices.

The third volume of the annotated selected letters of composer Benjamin Britten covers the years 1946-51, during which he wrote many of his best-known works, founded and developed the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh Festival, and toured widely in Europe and the United States as a pianist and conductor. Correspondents include librettists Ronald Duncan (The Rape of Lucretia), Eric Crozier (Albert Herring, Saint Nicolas, The Little Sweep) and E. M. Forster (Billy Budd); conductor Ernest Ansermet and composer Lennox Berkeley; publishers Ralph Hawkes and Erwin Stein of Boosey & Hawkes; and the celebrated tenor Peter Pears, Britten's partner. Among friends in the United States are Christopher Isherwood, Elizabeth Mayer and Aaron Copland, and there is a significant meeting with Igor Stravinsky. This often startling and innovative period is vividly evoked by the comprehensive and scholarly annotations, which offer a wide range of detailed information fascinating for both the Britten specialist and the general reader. Donald Mitchell contributes a challenging introduction exploring the interaction of life and work in Britten's creativity, and an essay examining for the first time, through their correspondence, the complex relationship between the composer and the writer Edward Sackville-West.

Benjamin Britten's The Company Of Heaven is a dramatic work of considerable substance, from which individual movements may be performed separately as anthems or concert works. The work sets a variety of texts from authors as varied as John Ruskin, Francis Thompson, Christina Rossetti, Blake and Bunyan, arranged for SATB chorus, soprano and tenor soloists, and orchestra, with a piano reduction in this vocal score.

Benjamin Britten's setting of Edith Sitwell's poem Praise We Great Men is arranged for SATB soli with mezzo soprano part, a mixed voices chorus and orchestra, and this vocal score includes a piano reduction for rehearsal purposes. The piece was left unfinished at Britten' death. It was being written for Mstislav Rostropovich to include in his first season with the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington D.C, in 1977. The manuscript breaks off after 118 bars, near the end of the fifth of an intended ten sections. The fragment therefore amounts to at most half the work, but it is fully composed. A further two bars were found sketched in one of Britten's notebooks and were added to this score in 1985, when it was revised by the composer, Colin Matthews, ahead of its first performance.

Britten's Elegy was first performed at The Maltings in Snape, Suffolk, by Nobuko Imai in 1984 as part of the 37th Aldburgh festival. This beautiful piece was originally sketched by Britten in 1930 upon leaving school at the age of sixteen.

This second of two volumes of the letters and diaries of Benjamin Britten is supplemented by the editors' detailed commentary and extensive contemporary documentation. The aim is to present a portrait not only of the composer but of an age.

Volume One of these remarkable letters and diaries opens with a letter from Britten aged nine to his formidable mother, Edith. Music is already at the centre of his life, and it accompanies him through prep and public school and then to London to the Royal College of Music, where the phenomenally gifted but inexperienced young composer is plunged into metropolitan life and makes influential new friends, among them W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. This was a time of prodigious musical creativity, a growing awareness of his sexuality, and the dawning of his political convictions. Most importantly, during this period Britten met Peter Pears and established the musical and personal relationship that was to last a lifetime. Volume One comes to a close in May 1939, when Britten, accompanied by Pears, departs for North America. The letters and diaries in this illuminating first volume and its successor are supplemented by the editors' detailed commentary and by exhaustive contemporary documentation. Together they constitute a comprehensive portrait not only of the composer but of an age.

The A Z of String Players surveys the lives, careers and recordings of over 300 string players from the past and present. Many great string players who have made recordings are included, from Accardo to Zukerman. The text covers artists from the earliest recording processes to contemporary, cutting-edge technology. In this clear and straight-forward publication, the artists are listed alphabetically, with a summary of their career, notable recordings, biography and critical appraisal of their recorded legacy. In addition, four compact discs present a selection of recordings from 69 artists. This package will appeal to enthusiast and scholar alike as a readable, informed and fascinating work of reference.

This is a double volume dedicated to two masterpieces by Benjamin Britten. While Peter Grimes established Britten as a composer of international standing, Gloriana, composed for the coronation of Elizabeth II, has never enjoyed a comparable fame. The variety of mood, characterization and pace, in each, illustrates Britten's exceptional gift for theatre. Commentaries on the scores reveal, for instance, how much the popular concert extracts gain from their context in the dramas. The essay by E.M. Forster - the inspiration for Peter Grimes - is reprinted here, and Michael Holroyd discusses Lytton Strachey's controversial Elizabeth and Essex - the source for Gloriana. Contents: Benjamin Britten's Librettos, Peter Porter; George Crabbe: The Poet and the Man, E.M. Forster; 'Peter Grimes': A Musical Commentary, Stephen Walsh; Peter Grimes: Libretto by Montagu Slater; 'Peter Grimes' and 'Gloriana', Joan Cross, Peter Pears and John Evans; Some Reflections on the Operas of Benjamin Britten, Buxton Orr; 'A daring experiment', Michael Holroyd; The Librettist of 'Gloriana', Rupert Hart-Davis; The Music of 'Gloriana', Christopher Palmer; Notes on the Libretto of 'Gloriana', William Plomer; Gloriana: Libretto by William Plomer

Edward Gardner conducts the English National Opera Orchestra and Chorus in this production of Benjamin Britten's final opera based on the novella by Thomas Mann. John Graham-Hall plays Gustav von Aschenbach, an ageing novelist who becomes obsessed with Polish boy Tadzio (Sam Zaldivar). The performance was recorded at The London Coliseum in June 2013.

Director Tony Britten's drama documentary examines the acclaimed composer's lifelong commitment to pacifism. Using a dramatic narrative to explore the development of Britten's pacifist beliefs during the time he spent at the liberally progressive Gresham's School in Norfolk between the years of 1928-1930, the film charts a time which marked a crucial period of the composer's personal and musical development. Interwoven throughout are contemporary performances of the composer's works and contributions from, amongst others, conductor and composer Joseph Horovitz, cellists Anita Lasker Wallfisch and Raphael Wallfisch, and Britten's agent for many years, Sue Phipps. John Hurt narrates.

Andris Nelsons leads the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in this 50th anniversary performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. The piece was commissioned to mark the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, which was built after the original fourteenth-century structure was destroyed in a World War II bombing raid in 1940. 50 years after its premiere it returns to the cathedral to be performed, as it was on its first airing, by the the City of Birmingham Orchegstra, Chorus, and Youth Chorus. The featured vocalists are Erin Wall, Mark Padmore and Hanno Müller-Brachmann.

A collection of films made by Tony Palmer for the long-running ITV culture series The South Bank Show, released to coincide with the programme's demise in 2009 after a lifespan of over 30 years. Films included are: 'Maria Callas: Callas', 'William Walton: At the Haunted End of the Day', 'Margot Fonteyn: Margot', 'Stravinsky: Once at a Border', 'Benjamin Britten: A Time There Was.', 'John Adams: Hail Bop! - A Portrait of John Adams', 'Renee Fleming: Miss Renee Fleming', 'Malcolm Arnold: Toward the Unknown Region', 'Henryk Gorecki: The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs', 'Berlioz: I, Berlioz' and 'Michael Crawford: The Fantastic World of Michael Crawford'.

Written during Britten's years in the USA (1939-1942) this atmospheric processional languished unperformed in a New York library until its discovery in 1976, the year of the composer's death. It was finally premiered in Birmingham by Simon Rattle and shows the young composer paying a passing tribute to the musical styles prevalent in his country of residence.