Three Elizabethan Pieces

Harold Craxton was a promising piano student as a child and, after training, began his career as accompanist to several of the early twentieth century's international singing stars including Dames Nellie Melba and Clara Butt and John McCormack. He published twelve songs and ballads between 1914 & 1919, apparently in the rather sentimental mood of the time, but then took up a professorship at the Royal Academy of Music in London where he taught for forty-two years.

From about 1920, Craxton developed an interest in early music and the Baroque and brought out volumes of arrangements of mostly English music including pieces which he made available for the first time. The 'Three Elizabethan Pieces', transcribed for oboe & piano from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (c.1610-1625), seem to be his only foray into arranging for wind and piano. An internet source gives their first publication date as 1944 but the OUP edition which preceded this one is dated 1964.