• Nicholas Maw's ‘Sophie's Choice’ Paul Conway

• Morton Feldman Colin Clarke

• Richard Ayres Peter Reynolds

• Elinor Remick Warren Bret Johnson

• Thomas Adès Paul Conway

• Further reviews Peter Palmer, Colin Clarke, Guy Rickards, Paul Conway, Calum MacDonald, Bret Johnson

Way back in the mists of time, in the decade when I was a card-carrying Prommer (1977–87), the BBC used to arrange (and maybe still does) a meeting between us regular Prommers and the Controller, Music – the man whose choices governed two months of our lives every year. Robert Ponsonby was the incumbent when I first had a season ticket and John Drummond was at the helm when I left London for a job in Paris. We never had the impression that anything we said made a blind bit of difference, but at least it allowed us to get things off our chests; all the Controller had to do was fend off our questions and comments with the oiliness then customary with the high functionaries of the BBC (they're all wonderful now, of course) and our silence was obtained for another year. (I remember Drummond contemptuously dismissing the music of Respighi as being beneath the dignity of the institution; Roger Wright, I gratefully note, does not share Drummond's snobbish ignorance, but I also note that neither the Concerto gregoriano for violin and orchestra nor Metamorphosen, both orchestral masterpieces, has yet been heard there.)

Per Nørgård makes an improbable Grand Old Man. For a start, he's not nearly old enough; though he was 65 on 13 July this year, you wouldn't imagine to look at him that he was much past his mid-forties. Nørgård, moreover, cuts no establishment figure: he is a large, imposing man, with a thatch of reddish-blonde hair splashed on top of a rugby-player's frame that suggests he is about to explode into action at any moment. But Grand Old Man he already is: with the deaths of his teachers Vagn Holmboe (last September, at the age of 88) and Finn Høffding (this March, at an Olympian 98), Nørgård is now the senior figure in Danish music; there are older composers, of course, but none of his international standing. He doesn't act the part, though: his gestures are gentle, his conversation calm. Indeed, he talks about himself and his music with a quiet conviction that draws in the listener like a youngster listening to a bedtime story.

Why the work of one composer survives and another doesn't remains a little mysterious. I myself incline on the whole to a Darwinian view of musical posterity: it is quality that chiefly determines the survival of the fittest, and some process of natural selection upon this criterion that ensures that the best are sorted out in the end. (If one throws in the other bit of evolutionist jargon—adaptation to one's environment—the limits to pursuing this metaphor become obvious). But temperamentally I distrust the endless discovery of Unjustly Neglected Composers. When the writer Mr. X is spoken of as ‘the persuasive advocate for’ composer Mr. Y, the phrase itself suggests the lawyer doing too good a job, and that the client so skilfully defended is in fact guilty—of lack of distinction anyway, if not lack of talent. There are so many Justly Neglected Composers. Every now and then, though, you make a discovery that upsets the comfortable applecart of this non-revisionist view of musical evolution.

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.

Bleak House Farm lies down a muddy track which leads off Heslington Lane, quite close to York's main golf course and a stone's throw from the grey concrete campus of the university. Here, in 1969, in a field more often than not unapproachable without Wellington boots, stood a dilapidated modern caravan just big enough for the occupant and his eight cats. The occupant, who kept halfcopied transparencies of music by himself and his teacher rolled up under the bed, was Vic Hoyland. His motive for such an existence was neither masochism nor romantic self indulgence, but extreme hardship. The cats – all related by vigorous in-breeding – had short legs and voracious appetites.

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.

Beethoven's famous letter to ‘The Immortal Beloved’ still remains a central reference point for our image of his life and music. Gerald Barry's 2007 composition for bass voice and ensemble – simply entitled Beethoven – sets this text in its entirety, continuing an engagement with Beethoven's own words and presenting a striking juxtaposition of language and music. This article explores the ways in which Barry at times underpins and in other places undercuts the apparent meaning of the words, and how he presents a reading of the letter that is clearly alive to its inherent self-contradictions. Characteristically, Barry brings together a number of highly expressive and strongly contrasted musical characters in this work; an examination of aspects of his compositional language illustrates how material is propagated and form articulated, and explores the way in which these techniques interact in the creation of an expressive and emotionally charged whole.

Although much of the best of Britten's unperformed early music has come to light since his death, there are still a number of substantial works to be discovered. The latest to emerge – appropriately premièred at the Royal College of Music where Britten was a student – is the ballet score Plymouth Town, which he composed during his summer holidays in 1931, following his first year at the College. The idea for a ballet was suggested by Violet Alford, an authority on folklore and particularly Basque dancing, who in July 1931 was a fellow lodger in the house in Bayswater where Britten had a room.

• John Ireland Symposium Mike Smith

• Ligeti's Laments Mike Searby

Martin Arnold is an experimental composer currently residing in Toronto, Canada. His unique approach to composition originates in the close relationship that he developed with Czech-Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous while Arnold was a doctoral student at the University of Victoria. Martin Arnold's desire to create music both familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown, generates paradoxical listening experiences that reside on the edges of things. In this article, the author explores a number of these edges and meeting places, especially as they occur within the composer's very singular string quartet, Contact; Vault.

Much of contemporary western art music relies on objectivist and individualistic frameworks of intellect which oppose any focus on subjectivity, embodiment or emotion. These approaches deny composers, players and audiences the powerful experiences facilitated by works which are of body and of emotion. We suggest that by facilitating a return to body and emotion in sound we create potential for deep, cathartic, and transformative psychophysiological states. We argue that these states can create shared experiences that directly resist the isolating, homogenising, socially apathetic and narrowing path paved by frameworks of intellect. This refusal can facilitate collectivised movement towards an ethics of care, through mutuality, solidarity and empathy. This extends further than musical practice and builds potential inroads towards greater social and political transformation. We offer a toolkit of actions and frameworks that enable embodied and emotional sound use: intensity, stillness, improvisation, collectivised praxis and uncanoning.

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.

This article is an introduction to the graphical impetus in the music of Kenneth Hesketh (b. 1968), from around 2012 to the present day, including his recent work, Viae (2020). Through examination of Hesketh's graphical control of a number of musical parameters, the article will demonstrate that the idea of a ‘musical ekphrasis’ can be extended through the incorporation of spatial aspects in determinate music to result in what the author deems a graphical ekphrasis. Whilst in no way exhaustive in its exploration of Hesketh's multi-parametric approach to composition, the article provides an analysis of selected compositional methodologies relating to both composition design and audience communication, situating them alongside other contemporary musical examples and trends.

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.

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.

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.

It seems improbable that the Tallis Scholars can have given their first concert 40 years ago: while the rest of us have crumbled, their conductor, Peter Phillips, hardly seems older now that he did when he founded the group. New music has been an increasingly important part of their repertoire over the decades, rubbing shoulders with the Renaissance stalwarts, and so it was gratifying that their anniversary concert should feature two world premières and one first London hearing. The venue on 7 March could hardly have been more imposing: the singers were stationed under the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, the audience radiating out from them towards three of the four points of the compass; and it seemed that most of the British musical establishment had come to pay homage and say thanks.