It isn't quite complete: Britten's "realizations" of Henry Purcell are missing, as are various unrecorded early and incidental pieces.
The collection is especially important and inviting because it contains small or incidental pieces by artists who are known for large well-plotted work.
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is really two works yoked together: the exquisitely nimble Overture that Mendelssohn composed in 1826, when he was 17, and a series of incidental pieces — including the popular Scherzo and the Wedding March — written for an 1843 production.
Unlike most LPs, there was no customary three-second gap between tracks, and the master was edited so that songs segued together, via a straight edit, a crossfade, or an incidental piece of music.
In a BBC Online review of the 2003 Thunderbirds soundtrack album, Morag Reavley commented positively on composer Barry Gray's incidental piece "Fireflash Landing", stating that it is one of several "catchy, pulse-quickening tunes" that "come fast and furious".
Others, like Washington Square Park, or the dining room of a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, are the incidental set pieces against which New Yorkers' lives are constantly mid-scene.
He also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs and other music.
Sullivan then produced his Festival Te Deum (1872), an oratorio, The Light of the World (1873), and among other pieces incidental music for West End productions of several Shakespeare plays.
Stanford composed about 200 works, including seven symphonies, about 40 choral works, nine operas, 11 concertos and 28 chamber works, as well as songs, piano pieces, incidental music, and organ works.
What is obvious now is that they were using those words to mean something that only they fully understood, and we citizens were foolish enough not to realize that we were only incidental spectators," the piece notes.
Originally written as incidental music, this piece was so successful that Honegger and the playwright René Morax expanded it into an oratorio version for full orchestra, which is better known today.
