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and nurtured by Britten, will be marking the occasion with a series of centenary publications, including the previously unpublished 6 Early Songs.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 Previously unpublished, these six songs are an important new addition to the solo song repertory.

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 The piece remained unpublished until after Britten's death.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'Very rich, and quite often ecstatic' was how Osian Ellis described Benjamin Britten's Suite for Harp, an attractive piece in five movements which explores the instrument's full expressive range. Composed for Ellis in 1969, and now considered one of the cornerstones of 20th-century harp repertoire, this 14-minute work features a majestic 'Overture', nervous 'Toccata', an atmospheric 'Nocturne' and a quicksilver 'Fugue'. As an extra tribute to Ellis, the Theme and Variations which closes the Suite draws upon the Welsh hymn tune St Denio.

Benjamin Britten's opera, composed to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. He took as his starting point Lytton Strachey's 'Elizabeth and Essex'. Sarah Walker and Anthony Rolfe Johnson star.

This landmark publication includes 61 songs, combining the contents of the seven published books of Britten folksong arrangements in High and Low Voice editions. Some of the songs have never before been transposed. The songs of Volume 6, for voice and guitar, have been transcribed for voice and piano for this edition.

In 1935 Britten hinted that a "large and elaborate suite for oboe and strings" was gestating in his mind. However, this work did not materialize and instead he wrote the Temporal Variations for oboe and piano. In 1994, at the suggestion of oboist Nicholas Daniel, the composer and Britten pupil, Colin Matthews, arranged the piano part for string orchestra, a medium particularly apt as the composer's next work was to be the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. The result is a dazzling concertante work that is surely destined for repertoire status.

Steuart Bedford conducts the Britten-Pears Orchestra in this production of Benjamin Britten's opera, recorded on the beach at the Aldeburgh Festival. The performance stars Alan Oke as the eponymous character with Giselle Allan as Ellen Orford and David Kempster as Captain Balstrode.

Jamie Walton performs three suites for solo cello composed by Benjamin Britten. His performance is captured in Blythburgh's Holy Trinity Church in Suffolk, England.

Collection of scenes from 12 productions performed at the Glyndeboure Festival Opera over the last 13 years. The operas featured are: 'Le nozze di Figaro', 'The Cunning Little Vixen', 'Gianni Schicchi', 'Cosi fan tutte', 'Billy Budd', 'Falstaff', 'Carmen', 'Giulio Cesare', 'Tristan und Isolde', 'The Rake's Progress', 'La Cenerentola' and 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg'.

David McVicar's acclaimed production of Benjamin Britten's chamber opera, recorded live during its premiere run at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2001. Paul Daniel leads the English National Opera, with performances by Sarah Connolly, Christopher Maltman, Catherine Wyn-Rogers and Mary Nelson.