FRITZ BRUN: Symphony No. 9; Aus dem Buch Hiob (Symphonische Dichtung). Moscow Symphony Orchestra c. Adriano. Guild GMCD 7306.

SCHOECK: String Quartet No. 2 in C major. FRITZ BRUN: String Quartet No. 3 in F major. Amar Quartett. Musiques Suisses MGB CD 6238.

HANS SCHAEUBLE: String Quartet op.19. MEINRAD SCHÜTTER: String Quartet. ERICH SCHMID: String Quartet op. 4. casalQUARTETT Zurich. Guild GMCD 7303.

Brazil's foremost ensemble of the late twentieth century, Grupo Novo Horizonte de São Paulo, transformed Brazilian contemporary music by cultivating a new mixed-chamber repertory and giving sustained support to a generation of emerging composers. That this cosmopolitan group took, then outgrew, the Pierrot ensemble as its cornerstone signals the medium it forged: a localized, evolving spectacle with a richly internationalist heritage. This article offers a panoramic view of the musical, intercultural and historical contexts that underpin Grupo Novo Horizonte's practices and legacy. Analysing landmark works by Sílvio Ferraz, Harry Crowl and others allows us to draw further connections between the group, the Brazilianness of late twentieth-century compositional aesthetic, and the realities of contemporary classical music-making in Brazil.

Broad textures, clear but unforced musical statements, a focus on tone and sound colour – at the 2015 Estonian Music Days festival all these characteristics of music from the Baltic states were much in evidence, yet its many young composers are all taking these ideas in different directions. The result, judging from the opening weekend of the festival, is a collection of works emerging clearly from a singular musical tradition, but energised by continually expanding diversity and invention. The vibrant new music scene here in Estonia belies the country's diminutive size.

Gerard Schurmann was born of Dutch parents in the former Dutch East Indies in 1924, but spent more than 40 years, including the most formative period of his musical life, in England before moving to the US in 1981. Even during his years in the Netherlands as orchestral conductor with the Dutch Radio in his early twenties, he maintained an apartment in London, sometimes commuting to his place of work in Hilversum. His experience was similar to Bernard van Dieren, another Dutch-born composer who lived in England, although not for as many years as Schurmann: Holland has made no particular move to claim either as a Dutch composer. It was in England that Schurmann developed his skills and persona as a musician, after arriving as a teenager in 1941.

The re-discovery and recent commercial release, on Regis/Forum, of one of my earliest performances of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, cannot help but evoke a mood of piquant personal reminiscence. The recording was made in 1967 at Olympic Studios in London, roughly two years after I first became acquainted with this riveting, endlessly compelling and many-layered masterpiece. The mid-1960s were marked by optimism, eager creative responses to the challenge of the new, and a spirit of idealism that is perhaps difficult to recapture in today's more commercially-driven world.

During the orchestral year just concluded, about 83,000 young people living in the metropolitan area of Washington, D.C. heard 43 concerts played especially for them by the National Symphony Orchestra. Another 41,000 high-schoolers from all over the United States were our guests for 30 Music for Young America concerts played in the beautiful Pan American Union building between April 17 and May 21, after the close of our regular season.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Münch and Pierre Monteux, now celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary, included what can only be called a triumphant visit to the Soviet Union during their recent European tour. They went at the invitation of the Ministry of Culture, and the orchestra and its management had therefore the standing of official guests. From the first rather overwhelming welcome on the tarmac at Leningrad it was clear that no effort would be spared to make the visit a success. The hotels were provided by the Government and we had our own restaurants, where four enormous meals were served each day. Never less than five interpreters were available both for official business and for the well-arranged sightseeing tours of which everyone took full advantage, and throughout we were conscious of a feeling of immense goodwill, official and unofficial, on all sides.

We all know that the Symphony of Psalms was ‘composed for the glory of God and dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’, but we don't always notice that this wry equivocation is appropriate to a work whose theme is the relationship between Man and God. A comprehensive and suitably illustrated analysis of the work in those (or any other) terms would fill at least a booklet. Here we must confine ourselves to the exposition and a few representative developments of the Man/God ‘theme’.

Occasionally, in the history of operatic art, great works, with no pronounced revolutionary tendencies, yet models of simplicity, of sincerity, of artistic integrity, have been subjected to the most savage criticism, as unintelligent as it was undiscerning. We remain astounded at the lack of insight, of common-sense on the part of cultured critics. Even la Traviata was held up for censure as “prurient, foul and hideous”; whereas, in the whole of Verdi's work, there is nothing more poignant and sublime than Violetta's appeal: “Dite alia giovane.” Carmen was stigmatized as “grossly vulgar and vile,” whilst Vincent d'Indy—amazed at the aberrations of men—sadly remarked that the “music seemed crazy to nearly everybody.”

As it stands at present Bliss's Colour Symphony is a revision made in 1932 of a work dating from 1922. The historical background of the work is the Three Choirs Festival, and especially Elgar, at whose suggestion Bliss produced a work for the Gloucester Meeting. This is Bliss's first symphony. In the chronological list of his works it comes after the Mêlée Fantasque for orchestra and the Incidental Music to The Tempest. It was followed by the string quartet of 1924, the manuscript of which was lost, and the next composition for full orchestra was the Hymn to Apollo, dated 1926. Between the time when the Colour Symphony was written and that when it was revised, Bliss had written a number of works not only musically important but significant because they showed a rather different manner of expression and way of thinking. Among these works was Morning Heroes, a large-scale choral and orchestral composition, in reality a choral symphony (1930). It was after Morning Heroes was finished that Bliss turned once more to the Colour Symphony. He took it in hand afresh and feeling that his grasp of orchestral manipulation had become stronger, he refashioned the whole work, leaving only the third movement in its original shape. In its actual state, therefore, the work is fundamentally different from the original.

The Swedish compser Anders Eliasson is a dancer on the volcano of desperation and in this respect the successor of Allan Pettersson. On the other hand his structures are extremely vital and concentrated, without resorting to lengths dictated by atmosphere. The trembling density and shivering complexity of his elaborated architectonics are always emotionally accessible, and the incessantly contrasting rhythmic obsessions never fall into additive isolation; the tearing, torturing tension is under constant formal control, due to the absolute singlemindedness in focussing harmonic development. Eliasson interweaves merciless terror and lyricism from another world.

With the exception of a few small-scale pieces programmed by the more adventurous contemporary music ensembles, the music of Salvatore Sciarrino has not been performed frequently in this country; BBC Radio 3 has given occasional airtime to larger works, but we have yet to hear much of his most important music in any form. This article should act, I hope, as a pointer to readers who might wish to explore his output on disc, which currently is really the only way to do so in this country.

It was 1970. I was a student in Warsaw. Once a week our composition class would gather at the Academy for an analysis course. We were an odd bunch, a Hungarian pianist, a black Cuban composer, a conductor, two spirited Polish girls, and myself. But we were also typical of the sort of international group that had assembled in the Polish conservatoires at that time—musicians brought together by a common fascination with the Polish School, which was still very much in full flight, and by a determination to unravel its technical and aesthetic mysteries.

Like many other composers, Andrzej Panufnik lost his entire musical oeuvre as a result of the Warsaw Uprising. By then he was already the composer of two symphonies, a piano trio, the Five Polish Peasant Songs and Tragic Overture. This last piece, which he had conducted himself in occupied Warsaw in 1944, had brought him considerable success. Listeners felt its terrifying resonance inaddition to appreciating its masterful construction, and the event remained in many people's memory for years, establishing Panufnik's musical position as a composer as well as a conductor. (Before the war, he had graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory with degrees in both fields, and later studiedconducting at Vienna's Hochschule fur Musik with one of the greatest conductors of the time, FelixWeingartner.) His pre-war compositions, premiered in the late 1930s, had already been very well received by the critics. There was no doubt that Panufnik would play a significant role in post-war Polish musical life.

Recently there has been a revival of interest in the music of Richard Strauss, and in Britain more attention has been paid to his lesser-known works. The symphonic poems such as Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel, along with operas such as Salome, Etektra and Der Rosmkavalier, have never lapsed from the performance and recording repertoires. But the undeserved neglect of pieces such as the Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon, and operas that rarely reach the stage in this country, such as Die Frau ohne Schatten, has begun to be remedied. A new development which can be seen as both cause and effect of this revival is the appearance of books in English dealing with Strauss and his music. These include recent reissues of Norman del Mar's three-volume Richard Strauss: a Critical Commentary on his Life and Works (1962–72, reprinted with corrections 1978) and Michael Kennedy's Master Musicians volume reissued with additional material in 1988. The study by Willi Schuh, whom Strauss chose as his biographer, was issued in 1982 in an English translation by Mary Whittall entitled Richard Strauss: a Chronicle of the Early Years.