As we celebrate his centennial year, perhaps it is now reasonable to speak of Elliott Carter's ‘late music’, but I doubt it. The Double Concerto – written more than 45 years ago – was once described as the culmination of Carter's mature style. And who could have predicted that the Concerto for Orchestra – completed in 1969, when Carter was sixty – would eventually join his Depression-era ballet Pocahontas in the first quarter of his total output. Every piece that once seemed to be the capstone of Carter's illustrious career has turned out instead to be a milestone that marks the beginning of another new path. Since he completed his first opera What Next? ten years ago, Carter has composed more than three dozen new pieces, comprising nearly a third of his life's work to date, all of it composed since his 90th birthday!

Music's ability to animate a range of expressive nuances between the tangible and the intangible, and to play many different roles in spiritual life, are but two reasons why artists with mystical inclinations often choose it over other media. The composer George Tsontakis (born 1951 in Astoria, New York, of Cretan origins) writes music that frequently explores mystical themes both directly and more obliquely. The goal of this – the first major journal article on his work – is to touch upon important attributes of that language and its development by comparing two recent works, both of which have been released in première recordings in the last year. Violin Concerto No. 2 (2003) and Man of Sorrows (2005), written within a two-year period, both belong to the concerto genre. (Although it does not bear the word ‘concerto’ in its title, Man of Sorrows is a large-scale work for piano soloist and orchestra). Despite their remarkable differences, both works represent a recent ‘crystallization’ of Tsontakis's musical language, as shown in the outstanding impact that they have made in the international sphere, and in their ability to appeal to both cognoscenti and lay people alike.

Captured by the 16th-century Indian poetess Mirabai and her works (transcribed by Robert Bly), John Harbison was especially intrigued with the manner in which she combined religion with ritual and eroticism. He has stated:

Her answers involved the ecstatic, the devotional and the artistic, but her independence and resolve and her dancer's vitality led my setting toward narrative and characterization, unusual territory for a song cycle.

The 400 block of South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, is rich in musical associations. On the southern corner stands the Auditorium Building, the 1889 masterpiece of Sullivan and Adler. Inside its huge theatre were born both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Civic Opera. For this gilded space with its unusual acoustics, Prokofiev in 1919 composed The Love for Three Oranges.

• Covent Garden: Birtwistle ‘Minotaur’ Arnold Whittall

• London, Barbican: MacMillan's ‘St John Passion’ Robert Stein

• Tallinn: Estonian Music Days Peter Reynolds

• Huddersfield: John Pickard's ‘Agamemnon's Tomb’ Paul Conway

• Tel Aviv: Yoram Meyouhas's Viola Concerto Malcolm Miller

• London, Cadogan Hall: Music in Exile Roderic Dunnett

• Oxford: Raymond Head and Clement Jewitt Lionel Sainsbury

• Further reports from St Albans, Sussex, Andover and London Jill Barlow, John Wheatley, Roderic Dunnett

• Recent Messiaen books Robert Fallon, Christopher Dingle

• Essays by Robin Holloway and Hugh Wood Stephen Walsh

• Rzewski's ‘Nonsequiturs’ Clemens Gresser

• John Coltrane and Jazz Songs Rodney Lister

• Maurice Duruflé Bret Johnson

• A flurry of Boris Tchaikovsky Martin Anderson

• Edward Rushton's ‘The Shops’ Colin Clarke

• John Harbison's ‘Ulysses’ Bret Johnson

• Robert Crawford and Edward Harper Paul Conway

• Joe Cutler Colin Clarke

• Robin Milford Peter Palmer

• Further reviews Bret Johnson, Paul Conway, Peter Palmer