If any members haven't come across it, there's a great music publisher in Germany specialising in study scores (usually reprints but including occasional new editions) of some quite unusual repertoire including d'Albert, Coleridge-Taylor, Cowen, Draeseke, Fibich, Fuchs, Gade, Gernsheim, Goetz, Martucci, Parry, Raff, Rubinstein, Schmidt, Volkmann, etc.
I've bought some of their scores of British music and the quality is excellent, with introductions provided in both German and English. The home-page is
http://www.musikmph.de/ (http://www.musikmph.de/)
and the latest catalogue of scores available is
http://www.musikmph.de/musical_scores/composers_sales/scorelist_eng.htm (http://www.musikmph.de/musical_scores/composers_sales/scorelist_eng.htm)
A great resource, I agree. Of course, scores aren't parts, and it's locating the latter which is the real problem in planning the recording of orchestral music.
BTW it would be a great help and indeed save the moderators a lot of time if, when including a link, members would simply highlight it and then press the hyperlink button (second from left on lower row).
Not only does Musikmph provide high quality scores of material otherwise unobtainable, but they're also very customer friendly. I ordered the Raff 3rd and was reading along with a recording when all of the sudden I hit a blank page -- a production error. I emailed them, and they immediately sent a fresh copy of the whole score, never asked me to return the misprinted one. That kind of trust and customer care sure are rare these days. And, the scores are not as small as pocket scores (good for aging eyes) but aren't as large as Dover reprints, which makes storage easier.
I agree with all that has been said about the above firm.
Of course, once one has the score and providing it is out of copyright, it is always possible to copy it out, as I have done many times myself, into music writing software, such as Noteworthy or Sibelius, from which the individual parts can then be extracted. Mind you, I find this quite a tedious time consuming process, Raff's "Im Walde" Symphony having taken me around 200 hours; but there are certain music scanning softwares around, such as SharpEye and Photoscore which can help, when I can get my tiny brain around them.
I bought a copy of Magnard's 'Chant funèbre' through Musikproduktion Höflich. I agree with the earlier, positive, comments.
Agree very much so. :)