In 2007, two high-profile musical responses to the Christian Passion narrative were written: the little match girl passion, by American composer David Lang, and Scottish composer James MacMillan's St John Passion. A devout Catholic, MacMillan's faith has influenced almost every work he has written to date, and a passion setting therefore seemed inevitable. Lang, on the other hand, has Jewish roots, and is relatively secular in his choice of extra-musical themes in his works: even when using sacred texts, he usually sets them in a secular context. Unsurprisingly, MacMillan's and Lang's contrasting approaches towards the Christian Passion resulted in fundamentally different works, yet both composers cite Bach as a key inspiration in their settings. This study examines the extent to which the influence of Bach's St Matthew Passion, in particular, is present in this pair of 21st-century passions, with regard to both their music and their theology.

BARRY: In the Asylum. CLARKE: Piano Trio; Etude; Independence: Part 1; Island; Isolation. FINNISSY: In stiller Nacht; Independence Quadrilles; Necessary and More Detailed Thinking. Trio Fibonacci. NMC D107.

When a Western musician thinks of Israel, the immediate association is of incessant political conflict and terrorism, not the country's rich cultural life. Yet, for a state that has endured one terrorist outrage after another over the last four years, Israel's thriving contemporary music scene — a part of classical music events, blossoming with over 2,300 classical concerts a year — is an astounding feat. In March 2002, while biweekly suicide attacks ended the lives of over 120 Israeli civilians, concert halls were unbelievably full despite the fear, or perhaps just because of it, as a constructive escapism. A year later, still under shaky political and economic conditions, Avigail Arnheim, the director of music events at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, and Dan Yuhas, the newly-elected chair of the Israel Composers' League (and the music director of the Israel Contemporary Players) initiated preparations for three concurrent festivals of contemporary music in October 2004. A Western musician, not knowing the details, would think that they were planning events for Berlin and Munich audiences, and not for Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem listeners.

SAYGUN: Symphonies (complete); Violin Concerto; Suite for Orchestra. Mirjam Tschopp (vln), Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz c. Ari Rasilainen. 3 CDs available separately: CPO 999 819-2 (Symphonies 1, 2), 999 968-2 (Symphonies 3, 5), 777 043-2 (Symphony 4, Violin Concerto, Suite).

Judith Bingham was born in Nottingham in 1952, and grew up in Mansfield and Sheffield. After making considerable self-taught progress in composition while still a schoolgirl, she attended the Royal Academy of Music (1970–73), where her teachers were Malcolm MacDonald, Eric Fenby Alan Bush and John Hall (composition), and Jean Austin-Dobson (singing). In 1972 she was awarded the Academy's ‘Principal's Prize for Composition’ for the ‘Fires of London’-influenced chamber-piece Maelstrom. After obtaining her Performer's Certificate, she continued her composition studies privately with Hans Keller (1974–80), and took singing lessons from Eric Vietheer and David Mason. In 1976 she was selected for the BBC's ‘Young Composers' Forum’ on the strength of two scores: The Divine Image (1976) for harpsichord, and The Fourth Universe (1976) for mezzo-soprano and harpsichord.

French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948–1983) is one of the few composers, perhaps the only one, to use an invented language throughout his entire compositional career. Vivier's use of what he called his langue inventée (‘invented language’) spanned the first vocal work in his catalogue – Ojikawa (1968) – to his final work, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (1983), completed only shortly before his murder in March 1983. Despite the pervasiveness of this technique – in fact, it is the only technique that remains a constant across all of Vivier's stylistic periods – relatively little attention has been given to the langue inventée in scholarship. This article presents a description of Vivier's langue inventée in three parts, beginning with a general introduction. The second part presents the langue inventée as a product of automatic writing and engages directly with Vivier's sketches to propose a method that Vivier likely used to write much of his langue inventée text. The final section of the article presents Vivier's langue inventée as a form of grammelot – a term revived by playwright, actor and director Dario Fo (1926–), which is associated with the dialect theatre of the Commedia dell'arte tradition. This article aims to demonstrate that Vivier's langue inventée is not a just a string of unintelligible nonsense syllables, but rather a very purposeful grammelot, freely composed in a two-stage approach to automatic writing, that reaches beyond linguistic semantics.

When the Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister (1910–1995) celebrated his 80th birthday in 1990, a discordant note was sounded by Antje Müller in the main Swiss musicological journal Dissonanz. Sutermeister had enjoyed his first major successes in Nazi Germany, and Müller now subjected this fact to more intensive scrutiny than had anyone before her, questioning how ‘neutral’ a creative artist can be in his dealings with a totalitarian state.

This interview with American composer Morton Feldman (1926–1987) has never before been available in English. Recorded in Paris in 1970, when Feldman's music was just at the point of significant change, it was published (in French) by the interviewer, critic Françoise Esselier, in the short-lived journal VH 101 which she co-ran with the Austrian critic Otto Hahn, in a translation by Nicole Tisserand. The original recording seems not to have survived. Here re-translated into English by the pianist and Feldman specialist Ivan Ilić, the interest of its content makes it a valuable addition to the literature on Feldman.

SCHOECK: Penthesilea, op. 39. Yvonne Naef (mezzosop), Renate Behle (sop), Susanne Reinhard (sop), Ute Trekel-Burkhardt (con), James Johnson (bar), Stuart Kale (ten), Cheyne Davidson (bar), Imke Büchel (speaker). Czech Philharmonic Choir Brno, Basle Symphony Orchestra c. Mario Venzago. Musiques Suisses MGB CD 6232 (2-CD set).

‘Contours’: New and Recent Music for Clarinet by DONATONI, SMITH, UDUMAN, CAUSTON, ROMANO, SCIARRINO, ERBER and FOX. Kate Romano (cl). Metier MSV CD 2074.

In Volume 57/223 of Tempo, my book, A Comprehensive Biography of Gustav Holst, was critiqued by Raymond Head. Not being adverse to justifiable criticism, I can accept much of what he has to say. There are indeed some editorial problems. The index, in particular, was originally perfect, but had to be hastily reconstructed at the last minute due to a publication design change. It is also true that there are a number of misspellings—largely due to some faulty guesswork from partially legible manuscripts – but not nearly as many as implied by the critique, especially when one considers the length of the work. And yes, I admit that I unintentionally included a misrepresentation of the physical Egdon Heath in Wareham. These items will, hopefully, be addressed and corrected in later editions.

The problematic relationship between UK composers and the Darmstadt Summer Courses is well known. Christopher Fox, Björn Heile and Martin Iddon among others have discussed why this platform for discussion and ideological conflict has not been to this country's taste. This article argues, however, that just such an event organised in the UK would enliven and enrich contemporary music making through increased knowledge exchange and collaboration. After exploring how Darmstadt operates within Germany, and its perception in the UK, a concluding tentative sketch will be made of how such a British Darmstadt might begin, and the benefits it would bring.

• Manchester International Festival Tim Mottershead

• Zagreb: 24th Music Biennale Donata Premeru

• Amsterdam, Nederlands Opera: John Adams and Jonathan Harvey Malcolm Miller

• New York and Boston: Nico Muhly Rodney Lister

• Birmingham: Tansy Davies Paul Conway

• Manchester and London: Bainbridge and Meredith John Wheatley

• Additional reviews by Malcolm Miller, Paul Conway, Jill Barlow

Wandsworth, National Opera Studio: Will Todd's ‘The Woodlanders’

This article looks at a creative trajectory in my recent work, an ongoing exploration of how the coordination of and precise interaction between performers in music-performance can be considered a primary compositional parameter (and perhaps compositional material in its own right). This investigation began with a survey of performer interactions in Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps and older music of my own. This led to an interest in the entanglement of ‘instrumental theatre’ and compositional scenarios in which performer behaviours, in relation to coordination and interaction, contribute idiosyncratically (i.e. outside of the more typical interpretation/improvisation models) to the music.

SKALKOTTAS: Ballet Suite: The Sea; Four Images; Greek Dance in C minor. MITROPOLOS orch. SKALKOTTAS: Cretan Feast. Iceland SO c. Byron Fidetzis. BIS-CD-1384.

SKALKOTTAS: Piano Concerto No. 2; Tema con Variazioni; Little Suite for strings; Four Images. Geoffrey Douglas Madge (pno), BBC SO c. Nikos Christodoulou. BIS-SACD-1484.

In 1974 Henri Pousseur created a large-scale homage/critique of Schoenberg, The Trials of Peter the Hebrew. That other mandarin Stravinsky has received two testimonials, a collaborative piece called Stravinsky au futur, and L'effacement du Prince Igor—The Obliteration of Prince Igor. All of Pousseur's resonant titles contain so many associations—here the Russian lineage, the Stalinist embargo, the social position (not King of the Stars?), the aristocratic conceit, the alleged erosion of personality.