For me personally, Béla Bartók is the greatest composer of the first half of this century. I think that none of his contemporaries has so creatively enriched the three basic elements of music: harmony, melody, and rhythm, all three in balance, without neglect of any. And his range of expression extends all the way from gentle lyricism to violent, atavistic outbursts.

His piano pieces For Children were composed two years before my six-years-old fingers played them, proudly, at any time to anyone who was willing to listen. They were somewhat strange to my ears at first, not like any other music that I had played or heard until then, and immensely stimulating: certainly not as frightening as my previous acquaintance with Bartók's name had made me expect.

Having asserted in my centenary survey of Roslavets (TEMPO 135) that no one has managed to generate a range of performances of his music, I was clearly asking to be contradicted. The day after I passed the proofs for press, I was discussing the whole question of the Russian revolutionary avant-gardistes with the soprano Jane Manning, and was delighted to learn from her of a series of European performances, by her and others, during 1979 and 1980 which had included quite a number of works by Roslavets.

Only two commercial records of Finzi's music were made during his life—one of Dies natalis, under the auspices of the British Council, the other, in the coronation set ‘A Garland for the Queen’, of his partsong White-flowering days. Though he conducted his own musicin concerts and broadcasts, he was not invited to record it—understandably, because of the 1939-45 War, and then his early death.