The Stainer & Bell Hire Library despatches performing material to the world’s choirs and orchestras. Our rental catalogue is a bright star in the firmament of British music. It sheds a commanding light on three centuries of repertoire and continues to grow in radiance with the addition of items of historical importance and unexpected beauty.

Recent additions have included A Cambridge Mass by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and his alluring Pre-Raphaelite cantatas The Garden of Proserpine and Willow-Wood. Other titles by this great English composer can also be found in these pages, notably A Sea Symphony, the Five Mystical Songs and Fantasia on Christmas Carols. There are works by his friend Gustav Holst, including his masterpiece The Hymn of Jesus, the overture Satyricon, The Forgotten Rite and Mai Dun by John Ireland, and classics of English pastoral such as Frederick Delius’s On hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. The spectrum of English opera ranges from the definitive edition of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen to Boughton’s The Immortal Hour, and there are songs, cantatas, anthems, orchestral music and concertos by Addison, Bainton, Bantock, Blow, Boyce, Bridge, Butterworth, Darke, Elgar, Jacob, Moeran, Stanford, S S Wesley and many others.

New works by Ronald Corp, Morgan Hayes, Thomas Hewitt Jones and Rhian Samuel bespeak a living tradition that complements this heritage in ways both entertaining and challenging. Meanwhile, the past yields further discoveries that are ‘new’ in the sense of enriching our awareness of its breadth and depth. There could be no more significant example of this than the original version of A London Symphony. Premiered at the Queen’s Hall just four months before the outbreak of the Great War, it is dedicated to the memory of George Butterworth, who encouraged Vaughan Williams to embark on a ‘real symphony’, and whose own complete orchestral works are also available from the Stainer & Bell hire library.

Stainer & Bell also act as agent for the Rental Library of ECS Publishing in the USA for the United Kingdom and Europe, and a supplement containing their works is available here.

Hire Quote Request Form

To obtain a quotation for the hire of any of our works, please complete the form below with as much information as possible. We will send a formal quotation to you via email as soon as possible.

Hire enquiries can also be submitted via Zinfonia, which requires users to create a free account. As with our hire request form, please give as many details as possible.