Hi Guy,
I've ust had a look on the PRS database and can tell you the Warsaw Concerto is still in copyright. The publishing rights are held by Keith Prowse Music Publishing.
I'm presuming you want to re-record part(s) of this work for your project, in which case you would need permission from the publishers, I'm pretty sure.
More generally, (and I can only speak from the UK perspective really - international copyright just confuses me) there are two copyrights to be concerned with - that of the composition (70 years after death of composer) and that in any given recording of that work (50 years after the first release). As far as I know there aren't any work-arounds to this rule - indeed it's more likely that a compser's estate might continue to retain and profit from these rights for even longer.
Not entirely sure about public performances of classical works but I seem to remember that for musicals and the like you still need permission from publishers for certain works, even for college shows if it's something like West Side Story. They like to limit the number of performances or something.
I also did a re-recording/arrangement of a Prokofiev work years ago and remember going through permissions for that one. It was for a TV title sequence and was going to be too expensive to use an existing recording but the publishers let us re-do it. Can't remember if we still had to pay them something though - 15 years ago and it's all a blur.
Colin
I've ust had a look on the PRS database and can tell you the Warsaw Concerto is still in copyright. The publishing rights are held by Keith Prowse Music Publishing.
I'm presuming you want to re-record part(s) of this work for your project, in which case you would need permission from the publishers, I'm pretty sure.
More generally, (and I can only speak from the UK perspective really - international copyright just confuses me) there are two copyrights to be concerned with - that of the composition (70 years after death of composer) and that in any given recording of that work (50 years after the first release). As far as I know there aren't any work-arounds to this rule - indeed it's more likely that a compser's estate might continue to retain and profit from these rights for even longer.
Not entirely sure about public performances of classical works but I seem to remember that for musicals and the like you still need permission from publishers for certain works, even for college shows if it's something like West Side Story. They like to limit the number of performances or something.
I also did a re-recording/arrangement of a Prokofiev work years ago and remember going through permissions for that one. It was for a TV title sequence and was going to be too expensive to use an existing recording but the publishers let us re-do it. Can't remember if we still had to pay them something though - 15 years ago and it's all a blur.
Colin