Editor's note: Robin Freeman, who was a frequent contributor to Tempo in the 1990s, both in his own name and under his favoured alias of ‘Tristram Pugin’ (signifying Shandeian Gothick, perhaps), died of leukemia after long illness in November 2004. About a year before he had e-mailed the present essay to the Editor of Tempo, apparently more for interest than as a formal submission. Despite the characteristic difficulties of the text, some of which have been modified in the editing process, and its equally characteristic heedlessness of reputations (few other writers would have had the chutzpah to dismiss Charles Rosen's The Classical Style as ‘underinformed and overambitious’!), it has seemed well worth publishing here.

Judith Weir (b.1954) is one of Britain's leading composers. Her three full-length operas (A Night at the Chinese Opera, The Vanishing Bridegroom and Blond Eckbert) have been widely performed in Britain and abroad. Since the 1990s she has had a fruitful association with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its sister group, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG). Weir's theatre work includes collaborations with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her interest in community music projects included an innovative spell of six years as the Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival in London. Recent works include the orchestral piece The Welcome Arrival of Rain for the Minnesota Orchestra, heard at the Proms in 2002, and the ensemble work The Tiger Under the Table for the London Sinfonietta.

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.

The Zagreb Music Biennale is one of the world's venerable new-music festivals. Its early years – the festival was founded by the Croatian composer Milko Kelemen in 1961 – might have been the most prestigious, but both before and since the upheavals of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it has offered an important outlet for Croatian composers and performers themselves, and for foreign music and musicians, to receive an airing in a city always looking to the West for inspiration – and recognition. It's also an uncommonly well-run and friendly festival.

Time was when it was almost axiomatic that a new concerto would be premièred by its composer, pretty well from the beginnings of the genre until the onset of the recording age, which captured Rachmaninov at the keyboard for his own concertos. These days, though Rachmaninov is barely 60 years dead, composers and performers inhabit such separate boxes that it's a surprise to see a composer step forward to perform his own piece – the more so when the composer is a violist; the last person to do that may well have been Hindemith. So when Brett Dean came to the front of the Barbican platform on 15 April, to join the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Ramon Gumba, he became an important link in a fairly short chain.

The last two of the works commissioned by the Boston Symphony to celebrate the first season of James Levine as its Music Director were unveiled by Levine and the orchestra in Symphony Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall in New York in April. John Harbison, whose The Great Gatsby was written for Levine and the Metropolitan Opera, had been working on an opera based on Lolita by Nabokov. He eventually decided that the problems presented by the staging of the work were insurmountable, and has, at least for the moment, abandoned the project, which he now considers misguided. He made the same decision in regard to the Fitzgerald novel about ten years before actually completing that project, so in the future this opera may also eventually see the light of day. Meanwhile, just as Harbison's aborted first attempt at Gatsby produced his ‘fox-trot for orchestra’, Remembering Gatsby, the work at Lolita has resulted in his most recent work for the BSO, a seven-minute overture based on material intended for the opera, entitled Darkbloom. Harbison's program note for the work does not name either Lolita or Nabokov, but speaks only of ‘a famous and infamous American novel’ in which Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) ‘is a just a secondary character’. Harbison chose Darkbloom as a title for the work ‘because it effectively conjures up the mood of this overture’, and ‘serves as an emblem or anagram for the complex tragic-comic spirit of the story and its author’. Darkbloom itself is attractive and skilfully wrought. A balletic section which portrays two young women playing tennis is the most memorable music in the work.

Good angel, bad angel is a new 1-act opera, premièred in Edinburgh on 20 May and toured to Glasgow, Peebles and Inverness on 21, 23 and 25 May; it received four performances in all. It lasts almost exactly an hour, and is scored for the slenderest forces imaginable – three singers covering six roles, and an orchestra of four players (bass clarinet doubling B flat clarinet, violin, viola, cello). The story is nasty, centring on the pointless murder of a miserly old shopkeeper on Christmas Day; it slightly reminds one of A Christmas Carol, except that it completely lacks Dickens's optimism and hope. The opera supposedly ends with the central character's redemption, but this is ambiguous and pretty hard to follow.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra celebrated the birthday of Hans Christian Andersen, 200 years to the day, with a world première by Per Norgård. His 50-minute ‘fairytale cantata’, entitled Will- O'-the-Wisps Go to Town, was inspired by one of the great Danish author's last stories.

Guy Dagul, already established as one of the UK's most sought-after composers of music for TV and Film, with successes in Hollywood, Channel Four (The Investigators), BBC (notably his score for the docu-soap Paddington Green, screened June 1999) and Carlton's Return to the Wild, has now composed his first serious concert piece.2 This is a Grand Fantasia for piano duet and strings, dedicated to his parents, the world-renowned Piano Duo of Harvey Dagul and Isabel Beyer. It was given its world premiere by them on the occasion of their Golden Wedding Anniversary Concert on 30 January in St Saviour's Church, St Albans before a packed audience.

I have had occasion to be sniffy about Lorin Maazel's music in these pages before (Tempo No. 218), not least because of its sheer lack of profile, of any hint of individuality. So it was with exceedingly modest expectations that I took my seat for his first opera, 1984, the world-première run of which began on 3 May. Even so, I was disappointed: no ditchwater is as dull. The basic problem is the absence of any discernible personality in what Maazel writes: the musical language of1984 is a thin gruel boiled up from left-over Prokofiev, Copland, Bartók, Ravel, Janáček, whatever was lying around the mid-20th-century chopping-board of Maazel's memory as he put the piece together. Add a secondary deficit: there's absolutely no sense of dramatic tension – the work unfolds at the same plodding pace throughout. Now sprinkle with the kind of mistakes you might expect from a rookie operatic composer. The opening ‘Hate’ chorus, for example, revealed instantly what was going to be a recurrent difficulty: the scoring and an over-ambitious tempo combine to make the sung text difficult to understand. Maazel repeatedly doubles vocal lines in the orchestra, sacrificing their clarity.

With Tippett and Rawsthorne centenaries this year, Mátyás Seiber's (1905–60) might have been overlooked, but Morley College, prompted by the composer's daughter Julia, made sure it was not with a well-devised festival comprising four concerts, two lectures (by Michael Graubart and Hugh Wood – both names familiar to Tempo readers, and the latter currently especially featured) and an exhibition. Seiber was one of a number of continental arrivals, the others including Gerhard and Reizenstein, who remained here to our considerable benefit, in Seiber's case becoming a much sought-after teacher of composition. Morley was a fitting focus for the celebrations, having welcomed him onto the staff in 1942 after more august, and blinkered, institutions had shown no interest. The subtitle of the festival – ‘From blue notes to twelve notes’ – neatly encapsulated his wide ambit. As Robert Hanson pointed out in his notes, ‘his refusal to accept the mutual exclusiveness of different types of musical study and practice, first shown publicly in his jazz course at Frankfurt, came to typify the man’. This is in direct line with the Morley philosophy since the days of Dr Hanson's reforming predecessor Gustav Holst, who is reported in the College's magazine of December 1917 to have insisted that the terms ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ were misleading: there was only ‘good’ and ‘bad’ music. (The danger now, as Wood pertinently observed, is that students reluctant to accept the authority of the teacher prefer to think their own opinions equally valid. Seiber would have had no truck with such self-deception. Ruthlessly honest yet tactful in discussing a student's work, he adopted the Socratic approach by indicating a passage and asking ‘why did you do that?’ After listening patiently to the reply, he would quietly explain the fault and request a revision for the next lesson.) Sadly, older pupils like Fricker, Milner and Banks are not around to discuss how he would see an extended piece through to completion. But more recent ones were present at the festival, including Graubart and Anthony Gilbert (also featured in Tempo recently), who can corroborate Wood's testimony to Seiber's belief that composition should be taught as a discipline grounded in tradition and the classics, backed up by thorough analysis and imitation of Bach inventions and Haydn minuets.

The Vasari Singers, now well established as a much-acclaimed London-based chamber choir, celebrated their 25th Anniversary this year with a concert at St John's Smith Square on 15 May featuring short specially commissioned works by ten notable British composers. As conductor Jeremy Backhouse described to me, a private preview of the works, all on sacred themes, took place at Tonbridge School Chapel in February, in the presence of the composers, thus setting up a ‘dialogue’ on interpretation. Although strictly speaking of amateur status, the choir has achieved much critical success, winning the Sainsbury's Choir of the Year Competition, appearing on BBC Radio 3 and at major venues, and has shown a distinct interest in commissioning new choral works in recent years.

The Russian National Orchestra and Moscow State Chamber Choir conducted by Mikhail Pletnev presented two unusually distinctive concerts at London's Barbican Hall at the end of March,3 starting with John of Damascus of 1884 – Taneyev called it Cantata No 1 – and ending the following evening with his tumultuous Cantata No 2, On the Reading of a Psalm (Po prochtenii psalma), from 30 years later. Although not claimed as such, the latter was surely a British première: not even that champion of the choral festival, Sir Henry Wood, seems to have done it.

JOHN TAVENER: The Veil of the Temple. Choir of the Temple Church, Holst Singers, Patricia Rozaro (sop) c. Stephen Layton. RCA 82876661542.

TAVENER: Lament for Jerusalem. Patricia Rozario (sop), Christopher Joey (counter-ten), Sydney Philharmonic Chorus, Australian Youth Orchestra c. Thomas Woods. ABC Classics 476 160–5.

TAVENER: Birthday Sleep; Butterfly Dreams; The Second Coming; Schuon Hymen; As one who has slept; The Bridal Chamber; Exhortation and Kohima; Shunya. Polyphony c. Stephen Layton. Hyperion CDA67475.

JOAN GUINJOAN: Concerto for clarinet and orchestra; Concerto for piano and orchestra; Música per a violoncel i orquestra. Joan Enric Lluna (cl), David Abramovitz (pno), Lluís Claret (vlc). Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya, c. Ernest Martínez Izquierdo. Harmonia Mundi HMI 987056.

ANTHONY GILBERT: On Beholding a Rainbow1,4; Certain Lights Reflecting2,4; … Into the Gyre of a Madder Dance3; Unrise3. 1Anthony Marwood (vln), 2Susan Bickley (mezzo), 3RNCM Wind Ensemble c. Clark Rundell, 4RNCM Symphony Orchestra c. Garry Walker. NMCD105.

MAXWELL DAVIES: Naxos Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. Maggini Quartet. Naxos 8.557397.

PASCAL DUSAPIN: Perelà, uomo di fumo. Orchestre National de Montpellier c. Alain Altinoglu. Naïve MO 782168 (2-CD set).

DUSAPIN: 7 Études pour piano; À quia (piano concerto). Ian Pace (pno), Orchestre de Paris c. Christoph Eschenbach. Naïve MO 782164.

DUSAPIN: Granum Sinapis; Umbrae Mortis; Dona eis. Choeur de Chamber Accentus, Ensemble Ars Nova c. Laurence Equilbey. Naïve MO 782116.

DUSAPIN: String Quartets Nos. 1 and 4. Danel String Quartet. Accord 476 1919.

DUSAPIN: String Quartets Nos. 2 ‘Time Zones’ and 3. DUTILLEUX: Ainsi la Nuit. Arditti String Quartet. Naïve MO 782125.