In recent years, Alfred Schnittke has seemed to provide a point of focus for interest in Russian music which has been absent since the death of Shostakovich in 1975: not least because he appears in some respects to be the latter's natural successor. Many of Shostakovich's aesthetic as well as technical preoccupations have played a significant part in Schnittke's work. Schnittke has developed these preoccupations, in fact, to a further extreme: his principal inheritance from Shostakovich, the sense of irony and alienation, has become the most obvious trait in the music of a composer who has consistently followed his own star quite independently of any stylistic clique.

If Schnittke's plundering of past styles brings to mind Stravinsky, important distinctions must be made. Schnittke does not quarry the past with Stravinskian detachment; his stylistic amalgams can be a deal more riotous (as for example in the First Symphony) than anything Stravinsky would have countenanced. It is in fact Shostakovich rather than Stravinsky who comes to mind as the more apparent influence, with his striking juxtapositions of the sublime and the banal, the diatonic and the chromatic. Schnittke's music can occasionally sound like listening to Shostakovich through an accumulated wealth of musical debris from the Western tradition. Another obstacle to any assessment of Schnittke's work lies in the apparent naivety of so much of his technique. Structures are often the most basic of designs, thematic techniques appear unsophisticated (transformations, canons, simple heterophonic devices). Climaxes are achieved by extravagant instrumental gestures, long pedal points are used to unify paragraphs (or whole movements, as in the opening movement of the Requiem of 1974–5), and serial devices amount to the simplest chromatic formulations. The Quasi una Sonata (1968) for violin and piano, for example, demonstrates that ten years before the Concerto Grosso No. 1 Schnittke was exploring the use of chromatic tetrachords in quasi-serial formulations.

Certainly it was the year to visit the USSR, as one rubbed shoulders with pre-Summit reporters awaiting Reagan/Gorbachev, and pilgrims celebrating the millennium of Christianity in Russia. Wandering up the Nevsky Prospekt, you saw musicians hurrying with instrument cases in hand; and whichever way you crossed the Neva or the canals, the babel of language sounded like a session at the United Nations. As Tikhon Khrennikov (still Chairman of the Composers Union 40 years after its notorious 1948 Congress) pointed out in his welcoming address at the opening concert, the Festival's purpose was ‘for building spiritual bridges between nations using music as the unique and indispensable means of communication’. Stylistic restrictions were withdrawn so that listeners would get an unusually broad idea of the ‘many-sided panorama of modern musical art’. Thus, not only ‘serious’ music but also pop, jazz, folk, and traditional musics were performed. Having attended the previous two Festivals, it was very interesting to observe the progressive attitude of the Third. Not only was there more of everything, but more variety: not only symphonic, chamber, and choral music events, but also organ recitals, modern violin music, opera, children's theatre, a song evening, and even one for light music. Not only did the best Soviet conductors and performers participate, but also the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra, jazz groups of the USSR and elsewhere, and the British avant-garde vocal group ‘Electric Phoenix’. Although the concerts were heavily weighted with Soviet works, still almost 40 countries were represented (from Cuba to Mongolia) with works by more than 150 living composers.

Wagner's Tristan is often referred to as the beginning of modern music: justifiably, in that in it a thousand years of European consciousness, will, desire, aspiration, pain, renunciation and guilt implode and explode. Taking his theme from the twilight of Europe's Middle Ages when the modern world was born, Wagner created a mythic drama which anticipates the central myth-makers of our time – Freud, Jung, and Marx. In a concept appropriating Christian redemption to Greek-tragedy's pity and terror, the gods are ourselves; and what Hardy called the pain of consciousness, proving too great to be borne, seeks release in unconscious nirvana. Much of the then avant garde music of the early 20th century, notably the Second Viennese School, stems from that tortuously self-involved but verklärte night; and it is hardly surprising that so incestuous a notion should have been balanced by its polar opposite. In his Rite of Spring of 1913 Stravinsky, born in a White Russia that had bypassed the European Renaissance, effected a conscious cult of the barbarically unconscious: a fertility rite and sacrifical murder in tune with the elemental cycles of the year, but also with the impending ‘death of Europe’ in the World Wars. Bartók, living in a country where a folk culture was still active, had less need of Stravinsky's cosmopolitan self-consciousness, but could fuse primitive techniques with the European legacy of Beethoven. Janáček, in Moravia, could create operas that were allied to seasonal rites, while probing the depths of the modern, divided psyche.

Górecki lives in Katowice. He is a rare guest in Warsaw – usually he comes to the capital once a year, at the time of the Warsaw Autumn Festival. About his work, his plans and his achievements, he is reluctant to talk. By the same token, the promotion of performances of his works is not a matter with which he concerns himself, maintaining as he does that a score, and especially one that is published and therefore available to all who are interested in it, speaks for itself adequately enough to stimulate possible performers, or else leaves them cold.

György Ligeti's music of the 1970s shows a distinct change of direction in its main preoccupation. Up to the middle 1970s his dominant concern was with textural elements, note-cluster development and the use of strict canons to create ‘Mikropolyphonie’. Mikropolyphonie is usually generated by a canonic development where each entry uses the same pitch array but also has a unique rhythmic shape and is therefore unlike-a normal canon (Example 1, below, is a good illustration). Melody, non-cluster harmony, and rhythmic clarity were not usually significant features. However the opera Le Grande Macabre (1974–77) shows a clear, unambiguous change of approach and a greater eclecticism; as Ligeti states: ‘In Le Grande Macabre there is less of the static, slowly, gradually evolving music. I felt I had worn these types out’.

Tempo 143 published a complete catalogue of Antal Doráti's original compositions and orchestrations up to 1982, and we issued an update to that list in Tempo 151 on the occasion of the distinguished composer-conductor's 80th birthday. Doráti's death on 13 November at his home at Gerzensee, Switzerland, has sadly put an end to the seemingly ever-increasing creativity of his last years; but herewith, as a small tribute to an outstanding musician of the 20th century, we detail the music he managed to write during 1986–8 (though occupied, as always, in a busy international conducting and recording schedule), with addenda to his long list of transcriptions of other composers.