The obsession with the Millenium was doubtless inevitable. It is certainly inescapable. None of us can avoid introducing catch phrases like ‘the new century that awaits us’ or ‘as we move into the new century’ into what we write or speak: we've been conditioned so to do. It is tempting of course to take stock from time to time and reassess how reputations stand, of individuals, of institutions, of movements in the arts. I have lived long enough myself to have witnessed the post-war ascendance of Modernism and the more recent arrival on the scene of Post-Modernism. More specifically, Mahler has been brought in out of the cold and enjoyed a triumph, the global scale of which, even at my most incautiously optimistic, I could never have predicted; and sure enough there are today stirrings here and there, of what my old friend Hans Keller might have spelled out as ‘resistances’ to Mahler's music, couched in terms that risibly arouse memories of the stone-age (stone-deaf) opinions of Eric Blom or Frank Howes, not to speak of Vaughan Williams's immortal judgment: ‘… Intimate acquaintance with the executive side of music made even [sic] Mahler a very tolerable imitation of a composer’.

‘This contract is certainly my greatest success as a composer, so far’, commented Bartók in 1918 on contracting with the Viennese publisher Universal Edition. After years of hit-and-miss publishing with two Budapest firms, Rozsnyai and Rózsavölgyi, Bartók was proud at having caught, with the 1917 Budapest première of his ballet The Wooden Prince, the attention of Universal Edition's director, Emil Hertzka. Hertzka was renowned for his cultivation of such musical talents of central Europe as Mahler, Schoenberg, Janáœk, Berg and Szymanowski. Until about 1926, when Hertzka developed heart troubles and took a lesser role in managing the firm, Bartók was generally happy with his Viennese publishing connexion. Universal Edition had quickly moved to bring out the considerable backlog of his compositions, had strongly promoted his works through its new house journal Muskiblätter des Anbruch, and had often spurred his imagination with complimentary scores, suggestions and in-house gossip. But then, from 1926 to 1932, when Hertzka died, Bartók's dealings with Universal Edition became progressively less personal, less prompt and sometimes even chilly, although his compositions did continue to appear regularly from the publisher and to receive a quite reasonable level of exposure. Thereafter, as the Depression and financial difficulties led to more serious publication delays and breakdowns in communication, Bartók grew bitter and imperious. Several times after 1932 he threatened to terminate his contract with Universal Edition.

When Goldschmidt visited the USA for the first (and last) time 13 years ago, he was quite unknown there, and arrived unheralded. He had recently celebrated his 80th birthday, but only with friends: in his native Germany he still counted for nothing, and in England, which had been his home since 1935, he was known to a few professional colleagues, admired and loved by a handful, and dismissed or ignored by the rest. As a ‘failure’ perhaps? Not even that.

Yet his bearing in those times might already have been taken for that of some illustrious figure constrained to travel incognito while in possession of secrets unknown to the world's governments or their corporate overlords; and that, indeed, was precisely what he was, and how in his last years the continent of Europe began to discover him – much to his amused and delighted astonishment.

(This interview with the editor of Testimony took place in New York in 1995, in connexion with the twentieth anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich's death, and is published here in English for the first time.)

Günter Wolter: Mr Volkov, how would you describe the acceptance or importance of Shostakovich's music since 1979? Has there been any significant change as a reaction to the publishing of ‘Testimony’.

Solomon Volkov: Generally speaking, there was a rather drastic increase in Shostakovich's position on the musical scene of the 20th century. But it is very difficult for me to assess the particular importance in this process of the publication of Testimony because, if you are realistic, you understand that no single book, and no single performance could change the fate of a composer. But it could be part of a much broader process, and this process of change certainly occurred in the case of Shostakovich.

The composers belonging to what would later be called the ‘spectral music movement’ started their careers in an unstable political period in France. Between 1962 and 1974, under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, France (the 5th Republic) was what we can call a ‘Gaullist Republic’. But in the middle of the 1960s the economic policy of the government aroused the hostility of the French people. The ‘Stabilization Plan’ of 1963 induced unemployment for the first time since 1945, and the authoritarian character of a government which, in 1967, legislated in the form of ordonnances, turned the people against the presidential policy in every domain.

In recent years, Europe has seen numerous retrospectives of the music of Mauricio Kagel. The last such in Britain was the 1995 Huddersfield Festival; since then a handful of his works have been performed in London. In tandem, Disques Montaigne have been steadily issuing their Kagel edition, which currently stands at eight volumes: the first four were reviewed by Antony Bye (and the first also by Nicolas Hodges) in Tempo 188. In a similar manner to recent retrospectives of Stockhausen and Nono, the focus has been upon the work of the last 10–20 years, perhaps not least because of the many country premières then available, but maybe because of a fashionable tendency to treat music of the 1960s and early 1970s as rather passé.

• Taruskin's Stravinsky Gerard McBurney

• Milan Kundera's ‘Testaments Betrayed’ Douglas Young

• ‘Die Soldaten’ in London Ian Pace

• Carter's new concerto David Murray

• Donaueschingen 1996 John Warnaby

• Clapperton at Oxford Ken Gloag

• Huddersfield Festival John Warnaby, David Power

• Michael Finnissy piano music James Erber

• Recent Sciarrino performances Ian Pace

• Recent Birtwistle CDs Jonathan Cross

• Bernd Alois Zimmermann Peter Palmer

• Jorge Peixinho Tristram Pugin

• Peteris Vasks Roger Reynolds

• Contemporary Estonians Mike Seabrook

• Brunel Ensemble ‘Red Leaves’ David Wordsworth

• Goossens and Arthur Benjamin symphonies Calum MacDonald

• Othmar Schoeck Lieder Edition Peter Palmer

• Tournemire's later symphonies Bret Johnson

• George Benjamin David Aldridge