Robin Holloway will celebrate his 60th birthday on 19 October. Although this journal has long preferred not to have its agenda dictated by birthdays and anniversaries, it seemed high time to celebrate a composer who has long been a valued contributor to and supporter of Tempo. A number of friends and former pupils – most, as it happens, dedicatees of different variations in Holloway's 2-piano work Gilded Goldbergs after J.S.Bach, reviewed elsewhere in this issue – have been invited to contribute short articles for the occasion, whether memoirs, tributes or thoughts about particular works. Their contributions begin in this issue and continue in the October number, when Robin Holloway himself will be our Composer In Interview.

The veteran Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi died on 2 March, aged 98. Not only was he a vital figure in the development of Italian music in the 20th century, but also had a significant international impact though performances of his compositions, his work with the ISCM and as a conductor and adjudicator. He was especially renowned as a teacher: many important figures in the music of our time studied with him at some period. Here two friends pay tribute.

The first part of this article was published in Tempo No.194 (October 1995), pp. 2–11, and dealt with Goffredo Petrassi's first two Concertos for Orchestra as well as other works, notably the major choral compositions Coro di Morti and Noche Oscura. At the time Petrassi was 91 years of age and it was intended to complete the article within a few issues' time. Other commitments supervened, however; but the composer's death has given added urgency to the need to publish a second instalment concentrating on his concertos of the 1950s. A third and final instalment, covering Concertos 7 and 8 and some of the remarkable compositions of Petrassi's final period, is planned for 2004.

The Scottish composer and pianist Ronald Stevenson, who celebrated his 75th birthday on 6 March of this year, is a man about whom it is difficult to remain objective. His Passacaglia on DSCH for piano solo, one of the longest single-movement works in the literature, has for some already gained near-legendary status. Yet Stevenson himself remains serenely, even ascetically unaware of both the adulation he induces in some and the bemusement that this in turn can cause in others – a quality that is not a little reminiscent of Busoni, the musician whom Stevenson probably admires the most, and whose music he probably knows as does no other. Stevenson himself readily acknowledges his admiration of others – it is part of his ‘human counterpoint’ of life. Percy Grainger and Hugh MacDiarmid are two further artists who act as centripetal forces in Stevenson's conversations. If there is something that was common to all three of these forbears, it was perhaps a striving to express in a single work of art a vast spectrum of human experience – one thinks of Busoni's Doktor Faust, MacDiarmid's Drunk Man or Grainger's Warriors. And yet, in his Passacaglia, Stevenson has arguably been as successful as any of them.

What are twelve-note rows really for?

‘…I don't need to use serialism to…achieve a unity between the motifs’ says David Matthews in his interview with Mark Doran (Tempo, Vol. 57, No. 223, January 2003, p.11); and most composers would say the same. After all, the motifs and themes of the first movement of Schubert's Third Symphony are so integrated that even the accompanimental cliché of repeated quaver chords turns out to be motivic and the whole of the ‘Unfinished’ is based dialectically on the tonic and dominant versions of a single three-note motif and their sublation. And in his Ninth symphony, Beethoven manages to base not only themes but key-successions, too, on a basic group of four notes and finally even creates that shattering dissonance at the start of the finale out of a simultaneous sounding of its notes. Or is that already proto-serialism?

Any Bostonian who cared about newer music, particularly newer American music, had long been resigned to the unhappy knowledge that nothing of any particular interest was ever likely to be going on at Symphony Hall. It was a shock, therefore, when it became apparent this fall that there were quite a few things happening in the current season of the Boston Symphony which one would very much want to hear. This new and happy state of things can almost certainly be directly attributed to the Music Director Designate, James Levine. Levine's commitment to newer American music was made manifest by the one program that he conducted this season, which included, along with the Brahms First Symphony, Roger Sessions's Piano Concerto and John Harbison's Third Symphony. Works have been commissioned to celebrate Levine's first season as Music Director, 2004–2005, from Milton Babbitt, Yehudi Wyner, and Harbison, among others. This re-connexion of the orchestra to one of the proudest features of its history under Serge Koussevitzky is cause for celebration. This spring's concerts by the Boston Symphony have included two new works of more than passing interest.

Poul Ruders's opera The Handmaid's Tale is hardly an unknown quantity: its world-première production in Copenhagen in 2000 was recorded by da capo (8.224165–66) in a three-CD set that received justly loud encomia. But the UK stage première, transferring the Danish production for a run at the English National Opera that began on 3 April, revealed – in a way that the recording obviously could not – what a superior piece of theatre it is: music, libretto, direction, stage design, costumes and lighting all coalesce to thrilling effect. A depressing number of operatic productions sacrifice musical integrity to directorial whim, so it's deeply heartening to report that, for once, everything pulled dedicatedly in the same direction, with outstanding results: it has been years since I've seen something this good.

Michael Berkeley's choral and operatic successes have tended to obscure his accomplishments in the field of chamber music, which include a serialist String Trio (1978), two String Quartets and a Clarinet Quintet from the 1980s and the string quartet Torque and Velocity (1997). His latest essay in the genre, Abstract Mirror, for string quintet, was premièred on 11 February 2003 at Bishopsgate Hall by the Chilingirian Quartet, with cellist Stephen Orton. The work was a joint commission by the players and the City Music Society.

The composer himself relates how Heinrich Schiff had requested a ‘self-drive concerto’, one that combined the roles of soloist and conductor and in which a ‘sense of propulsion was provided by the orchestra's inner voice’. It has taken twelve years since the work's inception for John Casken's Cello Concerto to reach Munich, the southernmost major city in Germany. And it was Casken who conducted recently the Münchener Kammerorchester with the renowned Austrian soloist in the Herkulessaal here in the Bavarian capital. The world première was actually back in 1991 at the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival, with Schiff (to whom the work is dedicated) and the Northern Sinfonia delivering it with ‘exemplary and total allegiance’, according to one of Germany's more prestigious journals, Die Zeit. The work is ‘approachable’, this particular review continues; is cast in a musical language that ‘admits in its gestural directness highly expressive motifs and clear contours of tension’; manifests ‘expressive colour’; and gently queries the ‘depth of communication between soloist and orchestra’.