The music of Mark R. Taylor (b. 1961) is as yet little known. In part, this derives from his unusual profile in the current musical scene. The initial characterization of his work given in this article takes his own remarks from a note inscribed at the end of a piano fragment from the mid-1990s as a framework. From his earliest compositions onwards, the handling of musical materials has depended on strictly controlled processes that are conveyed through a notable ‘simplicity of presentation’. This gives the work a semblance of postmodernism; but Taylor distances himself from the allusiveness, playfulness and irony of this movement, preferring to recognize a ‘personal expressivity’ characteristic of ‘the better kind of postmodernism’. These opposing tendencies to objectivity on the one hand and to expressivity on the other are components of a dialectical musical expression in which the music is ‘struggling but failing to mask profound inner turmoil’.

In 2002 Elliott Carter marked Oliver Knussen's fiftieth birthday with a short piece – Au Quai – for viola and bassoon, accompanied by the following comments: ‘As modernism seemed headed for shipwreck, Olly Knussen, treasuring the wonderful works that that movement produced and still does, stepped into the breach and … not only brought these works to a vivid enthusiastic life which has long been concealed, but also added significant works of his own’. Knussen's time has clearly been Carter's time too. Yet placing aspects of Knussen's compositional thinking into an American context can highlight the kind of distinctive qualities that, while leading less sympathetic British critics to write of an ‘aesthetic of avoidance’, might be more usefully interpreted as an intensely personal response to European as well as American modernism in all their various phases.

With Ada Sketches, for mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet and percussion, Mesmerism, for solo piano and chamber orchestra, and Calculus of the Nervous System, for large orchestra, in 2011 the young British composer Emily Howard completed a triptych of works in which she drew decisively on the life and thoughts of Ada Lovelace for inspiration. Today, Lovelace is recognized as a pioneer of 19th-Century mathematics, who in her lifetime attempted to bring together art and mathematics in Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. She was convinced of the power of mesmerism and believed that there was a possible mathematical calculation for the human nervous system. This article shows how Emily Howard took up and developed musically these central threads of Lovelace's work in her ‘Lovelace Trilogy’.

This interview, based on a conversation with Simon Bainbridge at London's City Literary Institute in June 2011, presents something of a rounded portrait of the composer while covering a good deal of ground. We began our conversation with a discussion of a recent work for orchestra, Concerti Grossi, going into some detail in matters of scoring and structure. The discussion then broadened to cover such topics as the creative process, formative influences (for example, his parents' activity in the visual arts, Debussy's Jeux, John Lambert and Gunther Schuller), instrumentation and the relationship of music and text. This led on specifically to Bainbridge's settings of Primo Levi, in for example the cycle Ad Ora Incerta, and to a consideration of the composer's relationship with the audience.

The composer Robin Walker is 60 this year. David Matthews, who has known Walker and his music well since the composer was 23, gives an overview of his life and the development of his musical language from serial modernism to what Walker calls ‘modal chromaticism’ – essentially a renewal of tonality, with strong links to both Wagner and Sibelius. The thinking that led to this development, which is linked to Jungian psychology, is discussed, and there is an examination of five major works from Walker's extensive catalogue, including his seminal orchestral piece The Stone Maker.

In 1897 Schoenberg composed an apparently unfinished set of waltzes, which thus far has been dismissed as juvenilia. In this article I explore how the waltzes reflect many aspects of Schoenberg's mature thought about large-scale tonality, focusing on two interrelated concepts, the tonal problem and monotonality. Examination of the waltzes through Schoenberg's own analytical methods reveals a series of closely interrelated pieces that follow a carefully planned progression through key areas making use of frequent intertextual references between waltzes. After demonstrating the connexions and progression of the waltzes, I propose that the set is not in fact incomplete, but that the tenth waltz offers a functional conclusion to the set as a whole.

As with the symphony, the rites have been read over opera as a form many times, yet even in the 21st century it stubbornly refuses to lie down and die. Three recent premières exemplify the basic strength of the genre: a revision of a radical 20th-century icon, and two wholly new works, one based on a psychological science-fiction classic (twice turned into a feature film), the other on a historical, post-medieval King of Sweden. What links the three together is the psychological examination of the events portrayed.

In a baffling case of unhelpful scheduling, major new works by Mark-Anthony Turnage were showcased by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra in concerts held at the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool and London's Barbican, respectively, on the same evening – 7 February 2013. Apart from necessitating an explanation for the composer's absence from the RLPO concert in their season's programme book, this double booking resulted in audiences being unable to experience live performances of two of Turnage's most substantial recent orchestral pieces. Surely one of these significant premières could have been rescheduled to another date – or, if not, a different time of day, creating a sporting chance to experience both events? Fortunately, the LSO concert was broadcast, enabling those of us who chose to attend the Liverpool concert to catch the London première retrospectively.

Given that the BBC Philharmonic had taken the courageous step to perform not one but two substantial premières on 1 February, one might have expected enticing potboilers to make up the rest of the menu. However, the remainder of the programme was devoted to Stravinsky's Petrushka (admittedly his most colourful ballet) along with his austere Symphonies of Wind Instruments. The concert was given a novel twist in that the first half (Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Hakola Violin Concerto) was directed by visiting guest conductor Håkan Hardenberger with John Storgårds as soloist; whilst in the second half (Broström Trumpet Concerto and Petrushka) Storgårds donned his more familiar guise as Principal Guest Conductor, with Hardenberger in his better-known role as trumpet soloist.

It seems improbable that the Tallis Scholars can have given their first concert 40 years ago: while the rest of us have crumbled, their conductor, Peter Phillips, hardly seems older now that he did when he founded the group. New music has been an increasingly important part of their repertoire over the decades, rubbing shoulders with the Renaissance stalwarts, and so it was gratifying that their anniversary concert should feature two world premières and one first London hearing. The venue on 7 March could hardly have been more imposing: the singers were stationed under the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, the audience radiating out from them towards three of the four points of the compass; and it seemed that most of the British musical establishment had come to pay homage and say thanks.

Radio Rewrite, whose world première by the London Sinfonietta (who co-commissioned it) was warmly greeted by the capacity audience at the Royal Festival Hall on 5 March 2013, represents a fascinating postmodern symbiosis that attests to the veteran minimalist composer's continuing quest to cross new aesthetic boundaries in his eighth decade. It formed the centrepiece of a stunning concert, broadcast live by BBC Radio 3, which marked the first leg of a UK Reich tour that preceded the work's first USA airing (in Stanford on 16 March by the other commissioning ensemble, Alarm Will Sound). Reich concerts are occasions, and here the master himself together with percussionist David Hockings opened the programme with Clapping, then joined Sound Intermedia in their artful shaping of the amplified soundscape in a virtuoso performance by Mats Bergström of Electric Counterpoint. It was a performance of that work in Krakow in 2011, by Johnny Greenwood from the rock band Radiohead, that led to Reich's exploration and exploitation of their repertoire – notably two songs, ‘Jigsaw Falling into Place’ and ‘Everything in Its Right Place’ – in his new work.

In an uncommonly enterprising programme, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under conductor Garry Walker, presented a world première, a UK première, a London première and a first professional performance in the same Maida Vale Studio concert on 25 January 2013, recorded for future broadcast on Radio 3's afternoon schedules. Despite the inclement weather, all four composers were present, and they all spoke briefly but engagingly about their piece. Though roughly of the same generation, each composer offered a refreshingly contrasting approach to orchestral writing in the present century.

You're probably wondering why a violin concerto was given its UK première by the chamber ensemble Psappha? An informative programme note by Paul Griffiths for the 15 February concert revealed that Swedish composer Klas Torstensson (b. 1951) had in fact written a much longer, though still compactly scored, work in 2010 and had ‘squashed it down’ in length and further reduced the number of players. The work's full title is Pocket Size Violin Concerto – scored for soloist with unconducted accompaniment from piano, flute, and cello. Whilst compression of this kind is not uncommon in other branches of the arts, and concision is a noble artistic aim, one's fear was that such drastic pruning might have short-circuited the music's arguments. Happily this proved unfounded; and whilst the original half-hour's duration might have been pushing it a bit, the modified version (at a whisker under 17 minutes) seemed just about right.

One of the most enjoyable characteristics of London musical life is that it is peopled by a generous number of foreigners who, every so often, take it upon themselves to enlighten the rest of us as to the music we are missing from back home. These can, of course, be hit-and-miss occasions, but it's in the nature of exploring unknown music of any age that you will happily put up with a handful of duds if you come away with a real discovery ringing in your ears. The Second London Festival of Bulgarian Culture (I seem to have missed the First) ran in various venues over the course of November 2012 and also accommodated art, film, literature, theatre and other forms of music (folk, pop and jazz). It opened its classical batting with a concert of ‘Bulgarian and British Symphonic Folk Songs’ in Cadogan Hall on 3 November, with the Varna Symphony Orchestra, Paulina Voices (the choir of St Paul's Girls' School) and the Holst Choir (from James Allen's Girls' School) conducted by Martin Georgiev. Pancho Vladigerov (1899–1978) being the only Bulgarian composer generally known to the outside world, it made sense to begin with him. His Shumen Miniatures, six attractive piano pieces based on folk-tunes from the town, Shumen, where Vladigerov grew up, were written in 1934 and orchestrated at some later date vouchsafed neither by the concert-programme nor the worklist at www.vladigerov.org. They embrace a variety of lighter moods: the first and fourth pieces offer lazy and lyrical summer-evening hazes and the second and third vigorous dances; the proximity of the fifth to the style of Enescu brought a reminder of the long common border Bulgaria shares with Romania (Shumen is around 100 km away from it).

In a substantial concert at the Barbican Centre on 15 February 2013 the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ilan Volkov, presented the British debut of Schubert Fantasia (1978, revised 1989) – senior German composer Dieter Schnebel's subtle reconstruction of one of Schubert's most original piano sonata movements – and the first performance of David Sawer's dramatic scena for mezzo-soprano and baritone soloists and orchestra, Flesh and Blood (2012). Both premières lasted around 25 minutes. Sawer's new work made a satisfying contrast with its Schubertian surroundings. But an even more rewarding, and certainly more congruent, companion to the Schnebel might have been Luciano Berio's Rendering for Orchestra (1990), which reworks the fragments of Schubert's unfinished Tenth Symphony in D major, D936a into a three-movement symphonic work that would have complemented Schnebel's postmodern re-imaginings. It would also have made some fascinating associations with the Viennese master's last completed work in symphonic form: the ‘Great’ C major Symphony, which was heard after the interval. Enough speculating on what might have been; what of the fare that was actually on offer?

Since reviewing the opening of London's latest new concert hall complex, King's Place, in 2008 I have welcomed the opportunity to follow this up by reviewing subsequent premières in their purpose-built studio-style concert halls pretty well annually. For 2013 Kings Place celebrates the centenary of the birth of one of the UK's most illustrious composers, in its three-day series ‘Britten at 100’. As one of the involved presenting pianists, Andrew Matthews-Owen, aptly commented in the Kings Place brochure: ‘It's strange that people are still a little scared of Britten – I think he'd enjoy the fact that his music still has the ability to shock and unsettle us today’. Well I'm certainly not scared of any composer I'm reviewing, but on this special ‘Britten’ occasion I was at pains to point out to the powers that be that I was mostly there on 9 February to review the two probably rather more ‘quirky’ world premières by Simon Holt and Jonathan Dove rather than make any major comment about Britten as such.