• 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

Between 22 September and 4 October last year, Gerard McBurney made a short research and lecturing trip to St Petersburg and Moscow. On his return he circulated a private, informal account of his activities and impressions of the current state of musical life in Russia to a number of interested parties and friends. Among these was the Editor of Tempo, who considered that parts of the report were of such interest that they merited wider circulation. At his request, Gerard McBurney has prepared this edited version of his report for publication.

BROUWER: Aurolucent Circles (Percussion Concerto); Mandala; Remembrances; Sizzle. Evelyn Glennie (perc), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra c. Gerard Schwarz. Naxos 8.559250.

BAUER: Lament on African Themes; Concertino for oboe clarinet and strings; Trio Sonata No.1; Symphonic Suite for strings; Duo for oboe and clarinet; American Youth Concerto. Ambache Chamber Orchestra and Ensemble. Naxos 8.559253.

KIM: Violin Concerto; Dialogues for piano and orchestra; Cornet for narrator and orchestra. Cecylia Arzewski (vln), William Wolfram (pno), Robert Kim (narr), RTE National Symphony Orchestra c. Scott Yoo. Naxos 8.559226.

LEVY: Symphony No. 3; Cello Concerto No. 2; Rondo Tarantella; A Summer Overture. Scott Ballantyne (vlc), RTE National Symphony Orchestra c. Takuo Yuasa. Naxos 8.559234.

The world première of Jörg Widmann's new opera Babylon, conducted by Kent Nagano at the Bayerische Staatsoper, on 27 October 2012, was an evening to remember, for both the spectacular production and the musical performances. It began with a poignant announcement from the stage that Widmann had dedicated the performance in gratitude to the memory of his teacher, Hans Werner Henze, who had died that very morning in Dresden at the age of 86. One's thoughts turned to Henze's own wonderful operatic oeuvre, especially The Bassarids, which shared with Babylon an interest in ancient myth and pastiche. Yet curiously, it was a totally different postmodern influence on Widmann that seemed more evident here: that of another mentor, Wolfgang Rihm.

London, Barbican: Henze's ‘Scorribanda Sinfonica’ Malcolm Miller

Huddersfield: Contemporary Music Festival, 2006 Paul Conway

London: White, Smith and Hinton Martin Anderson

London, Queen Elizabeth Hall: Lachenmann John Wheatley

California, Napa: Anders Hillborg's ‘Arietta Quartet’ Jeff Dunn

London: Finnish premières Martin Anderson

London, Warehouse: Finnissy's ‘Back to Earth’ Jill Barlow

London, Barbican: Pintscher and Fedele Malcolm Miller

During the 20 years that followed the completion of his first vocal work, The sayings of Páter Boniemisza op.7 (1963–68), György Kurtág established himself as a composer with an exceptional aptitude for vocal writing. His compositions for voice outweigh those for instruments alone in both quantity and substance throughout this period, during which his second string quartet, Hommage à Mihály András (12 Microludes) op. 13 (1977), is a ravishingly beautiful anomaly.

On 22 April 1944 Béla Bartók wrote to his son, Peter:

Spring has now indisputably arrived. A kind of ‘kutyafa’ (dogwood) is in bloom, like acacias flowering at home. The birds have become completely drunk with the spring and are putting on concerts the like of which I've never heard. They start with puty-puty-puty ./../../. and end up with various new bird sounds (clearly from later arrivals). The keeps on creating more and more variants.

Kurtág's microludes are remarkable in at least two respects: firstly, some of them are so brief as to make even Webern seem verbose in comparison, and, secondly, Kurtág has managed to create something relatively rare—a form born of the chromatic scale itself The microludes are sets of 12 tiny preludes, one for each semitone. Each set moves from C to B by analogy to Bach's ‘48’; however, unlike the Bach pieces, the microludes are not essays in a particular tonality, but rather explore certain relationships to a particular individual pitch.

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.

As a young pianist, whenever I listened to a recording by Artur Rubinstein, the music always sounded wonderfully convincing. But then, when it came down to studying the score, it was somewhat disturbing to find that he often performed the music in ways that were contrary to the score. This experience provoked many thoughts and discussions regarding ‘authenticity’, artistic ‘greatness’, and the changing contexts of performance practice.

If one were seeking a metaphor for Ave Mavis Stella from among one's familiar musical experience, all the signs would point to a late Beethoven quartet. Of course the analogy between a string quartet and a sextet of mixed timbre is not literal, while the comparison of a work not yet two years old with some of the most visionary pieces ever written could be misconstrued, even if one swore it was only for analytical purposes as one was dragged screaming away to serve a five-year term for pretentiousness. But fortunately real affinity among composers and between pieces of music is not a function of our historical neuroses, and there are encouraging signs that sensitive and aware listeners can hear that it is not. One such friend of mine, having just heard Ave Maris for the second time, remarked that the first hearing some months earlier had thrown him into a kind of ‘2001’ outer space, while at the second hearing he realized he was listening to an absolutely classical piece of chamber music. In fact, as we will see, his two statements are very far from antithetical. At any rate, there is every reason to hope that such a listener, given a finite number of further hearings, would himself make the jump from ‘an absolutely classical piece of chamber music’ to ‘a late Beethoven quartet’ without any difficulty.

This edited transcript of a public pre-concert discussion with composer, theorist and critic Benjamin Boretz not only touches on early personal encounters with Babbitt but also ranges over issues of reception of his music, listening experiences, transformations of music's temporality, connections to Schoenberg, Webern, Cage, and postmodernism, stylistic changes over Babbitt's career and composerly poetics, as well as motivations and consequences for precompositional structures and systems. The discussion took place on 22 November 2015, at the first of three recitals during the 2015–16 concert season at Spectrum, in New York City, in which Augustus Arnone for the second time performed all of Milton Babbitt's solo piano works, this time in honour of the composer's centenary.

Although it is a mistake to believe that the material traces left by a composer's practice can help us to properly reconstruct the creative process, compositional sketches may throw light on it. Nevertheless many such accounts take their respective case studies as isolated objects that are, unfortunately, sometimes decontextualised from the whole record of their authors. Ethnography potentially offers a better methodology and auto-ethnographic accounts, third party observations, and mixtures of these approaches have already been applied to contemporary music. This article aims to combine both these approaches in a discussion of a recent compositional project at IRCAM, carried out by a team of three people. I consider how the previous artistic experiences and achievements of these people, jointly and separately, have had a substantial impact on their shared project. In addition, as the case study had a scientific underpinning, I comment on the cognitive bridge that the composer had to build between scientific and musical conceptions.

In his essay ‘What are twelve-note rows really for?’ (Tempo, Vol. 57, No. 225, July 2003, p. 36), Michael Graubart suggests that ‘twelve-note rows may give back to atonal music a goal-directed force and the possibility of closure’. He argues that by using a row, composers set up a pattern that can ultimately provide a sense of completion or closure to an atonal piece, although he admits that listeners may have trouble recognizing this completion. Closure in tonal music is in fact a powerful musical force, but one whose strength depends largely upon the hierarchy found in tonal melody and harmony. Consider the closure at the end of a piece. It is here that an authentic cadence signals the coming to rest of large-scale musical forces, both melodic and harmonic, on several levels of structure. We might make analogies, as Graubart does, between tonal closure and the pattern-completion possible with a twelve-note row, but one wonders if any row, or any twelve-note piece for that matter, can provide the type of multi-level completion that is possible within the tonal hierarchy.