In Germany during the last few years interest has at last been growing in composers who were forced to go into exile (and were still able to do so) in the age of National Socialism. Thus attention has been focussed again in the land of his origin – though pretty belatedly – on the composer and conductor Berthold Goldschmidt, born in Hamburg in 1903. Goldschmidt had to reach a positively biblical age before he received serious consideration: in 1987, on the occasion of the Berlin Festival ‘Music in Exile’; in Duisburg, Hamburg, Essen, and – with heightened intensity – in the most northerly region of the Federal Republic, Schleswig-Holstein. Some of his works were performed on these occasions, and received with amazement and perplexity. But above all Goldschmidt was constantly questioned in interviews and panel discussions, as a ‘witness of his time’. Of course he is, beyond doubt, the ideal conversational partner: he can describe and comment on German musical life in the 1920's and early 1930's most vividly and with a touch of irony; he can report movingly, yet apparently without any trace of bitterness, on the abrupt breaks in his life and his musical career – emigration to England, the struggle to make a fresh start in that country (of which he became a naturalized citizen in 1947), the attempt to establish himself as a creative artist. One learns a great deal about the numerous disappointments on the way to a viable and satisfying existence as an artist, and about his virtual silence as a composer for almost 25 years, from 1958 to 1982.

In the past ten years a remarkable change has come over Brian Elias. He has turned from being a miniaturist to being a composer on a symphonic scale and with symphonic aspirations. Not that he has written any work with so self-conscious a title as ‘symphony’ – at least, not yet. But in these few years he has given us two extended cycles for voice and symphony orchestra, a large-scale single-movement orchestral work that must certainly be called symphonic, a set of 49 Variations for piano inspired by Beethoven's set of 32 in C minor, and now an orchestral ballet in progress for Kenneth Macmillan and the Royal Ballet. All these, and some impressive chamber works too, have come from a composer whose earlier reputation was based on a tiny scattering of compositions including a rarified solo soprano piece (based on a particularly obscure bit of Browning), a piece for solo violin, and the microscopic Five Piano Pieces for right hand alone.

• ‘Clarissa’ at the Coliseum David Gallagher

• Carter's Violin Concerto in San Francisco David Schiff

• Schweinitz's ‘Patmos’ in Munich Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich

• Aldeburgh 1990 Anthony Burton

• Elision Ensemble, Melbourne, Australia Richard Toop

• Brighton Festival 1990 Guy Rickards

• Cheltenham: Bainbridge's Double Concerto Richard Leigh Harris

• New York: Women in Music and Soviet Contemporaries Claire Polin

• Two Choral Premières James Reid Baxter

It has been brought to our notice that there were a number of errors in the biographical information supplied in Ivan Moody's article ‘Giya Kancheli: an Introduction to his Music’, though these were partly the result of the inherent difficulties in extracting accurate information from the USSR. The following corrections have the authority of the composer.