On 5 December 5 1941, two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Virgil Thomson wrote to Gertrude Stein, his friend and the cocreator of their opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The bulk of the letter concerned Thomson's most recent plan for publication of the opera, including details of dividing the royalties and expenses involved in the undertaking (a continual source of disagreement and haggling between them). At the end of the letter, referring to Stein's assurance at the end of her most recent letter to him that the European war would be over soon and that they would soon meet again in Paris, Thomson wrote, ‘… I miss you a great deal but do hope that you are right that we shall be seeing each other soon in Paris. I wouldn't know; I have no prophetic sense about wars … When the war is over we must write another opera. Only we must wait till then, because I don't think we could choose the subject very well by mail'. His next preserved letter to her was almost five years later. In that letter, dated 5 March 1946, Thomson wrote, ‘Carl [Van Vechten] says the opera is nearly finished. I hope so. I want to see it. I pine for it’.

The 1950s was a particularly important decade for Peter Maxwell Davies. It was the period when he established the fundamental elements of his compositional technique; the decade in which he composed his first acknowledged works; and a time, coinciding with his emergence as a composer of substance, when he travelled to Darmstadt, Paris and Rome. It was also the period that witnessed the publication of two of his own articles, and the decade in which his interest in early music – particularly plainchant – and Indian classical music began to influence his own compositional thinking and resulting works.

When Messiaen finished Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine (1943–4), almost all the orchestral works he had composed up to that point had been religious in ethos.1 There was no real sign that this would change: that he would stop devoting his orchestral works to the service of the Catholic faith. That some 20 years elapsed before he attempted another orchestral sacred work is intriguing. It was Couleurs de la cité céleste (1963) that broke the ice, and after it the orchestral and the sacred became once again closely united, as they had been in the pre-Turangalîla era. Couleurs also brought us his first obvious use of plainchant in an orchestral work, thus heightening the religiosity of this score to approximate that enshrined in Trois petites liturgies. And as Messiaen's fame continued to grow, the religious elements in his music grew with it, both in ubiquity and intensity. Retrospectively, sacred orchestral works composed after Couleurs exceed those before Trois petites liturgies not only in number, but also in magnitude, profundity and grandeur.

Q: What is ‘Orango’?

A:Orango is an unfinished satirical opera, sketched in 1932 when Shostakovich was in the middle of writing Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

The Anglo-Indian composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892–1988) is best known for his virtuosic, highly decorative and complex style of piano music and vast post-Romantic scale, as typified by his magnum opus, Opus Clavicembalisticum. In his last creative period (post-1973), however, he composed a number of more concise works which depart from the idiom of the piano. This article examines two of these works, Il tessuto d'arabeschi (1979) for flute and string quartet, and Fantasiettina Atematica (1981) for wind trio. It looks primarily at the place of these two works in Sorabji's oeuvre as a whole, but also the wider issues of Sorabji's compositional approach and musical attitudes in later life.

• Manchester: Goehr's ‘Turmmusik’ Tim Mottershead

• London: Two Goehr premières Malcolm Miller

• Manchester: David Matthews Paul Conway

• London: Myaskovsky's Sixth Symphony Guy Rickards

• Manchester: more Mahler commissions Tim Mottershead

• Liverpool: Ensemble 10/10 Helen Thomas

• Further reports from London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Zagreb Martin Anderson, Brian Inglis, Jill Barlow, Paul Conway, Donata Premeru

• Experimental Music Tim Rutherford-Johnson

• Dane Rudhyar Edward Venn

• Erik Chisholm Stephanus Muller

• The Polignacs, Princess and Prince Anthony Gritten

• Günter Raphael's symphonies Calum MacDonald

• Aldo Finzi and Marcel Tyberg Martin Anderson

• Dallapiccola Tim Mottershead

• Glanert's ‘Caligula’ Guy Rickards

• Further reviews PeterPalmer, Edward Venn, Colin Clarke, Bret Johnson, Paul Conway, Calum MacDonald