Oliver Messiaen is a classically–minded composer with a strong affinity to Mozart, Rameau and Scarlatti. His often intimate music is full of irrepressible charm and frequently betrays a whimsical sense of humour. Simplicity of expression is Messiaen's overwhelming trait and while he has composed on a large scale, he has a penchant for miniatures …

Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux is most often programmed as individual pieces: which is as it should be, since it is not a cycle like the Vingt regards sur I'enfant Jésus but a collection from which to select what, and how much, one wants to play or hear at a particular time. All the more important to have complete recordings of it, so what we listen to has a consistent interpretative grain. In addition to the style oiseau there is of course the style Loriod, an essential point of reference, above all for the rendering of certain percussive effects; but, once these have become technical second nature, the margins of fantasy seem as comfortable as with any other composer. In fact what Bertrand Poirot-Delpêche calls le paradoxe flaubertien would seem especially applicable to music so full of precise detail: plus les détails s'accumulent, plus il faut rêver leur sens.

Ancient, ornately carved palaces in the midst of a megalopolis, the spirituality of delicate green Koryo celadon, an archaic traditional music as pungent (and delicious) as kimchi – once experienced, never forgotten. Add to these the city of Kyongju, called the ‘museum without walls’, the many reminders of a long history of suffering under Japanese oppression and the uninterrupted excellence of its poetry and visual arts, and one begins to feel Korea's special quality. The country is prosperous; education in all fields, including the arts, is given high priority. Contemporary life is vibrant and intense; the people possess a seemingly boundless capacity for hard work as well as for celebration, festivity, ceremony and mourning – and for music-making. Hardly surprising, then, that the compositional scene in the Republic of South Korea is booming, to say the least.

On 25 September 1936 Benjamin Britten's Our Hunting Fathers, his first adult song cycle, first score for full orchestra and self-confessed ‘real op.l’, had its Norwich première. Its public agenda, both political and social, was set by W.H. Auden's 1930 Poems, and its aggressive technical and moral exhortation desired to épater les ancêetres much as Berg's Wozzeck had sought to do. Its private agenda is, however, of far greater interest. In 1930 it had seemed that the detached, self-conscious Künstlerarzt could take the knife to the social gangrene of the prewar generation and its political prescriptions; by 1936 such detachment yielded neither public nor private satisfaction. Political despair now had three names: German, Jew, and Spain; personal despair derived from the realization that ‘love without love's proper object' led only to love's privation and defeat. The texts Auden assembled for Our Hunting Fathers acted (as many of the choruses in the Auden/Isherwood play The Dog Beneath the Skin had done) as an examen de conscience, both confession and homily, with a Prologue and Epilogue in particular addressed to a composer increasingly aware of an imprisoning emotional isolation.

• Volume I of Messiaen's ‘Traite’, ‘Music and Color’, and organ recordings Christopher Dingle

• Robert Craft's Stravinsky memoirs and recordings Rodney Lister

• Birtwisde's ‘The Cry of Anubis’ Jonathan Cross

• Huddersfield Festival 1994 Steve Crowther

• Jean Barraqué Robin Freeman

• Benjamin, Turnage and Martland Antony Bye

• Bernard Stevens Bret Johnson

• Saariaho and other Finns Guy Rickards

• Modern choral discs Martin Anderson

• American operas Bret Johnson

• Recent NMC discs Antony Bye

• Bass clarinet and Martin Ellerby Peter Palmer

• South American music Guy Rickards

• Malipiero Symphonies Bret Johnson

• Et cetera … Calum MacDonald