The Second Violin Sonata for violin and piano (1968), subtided Quasi una Sonata, is one of Alfred Schnittke's most popular works, and it is one of my personal favourites among his pieces (alongside his First Symphony, First String Quartet, First Hymn, Second and Third Violin Concerti, Three Madrigals, etc). I discovered Schnittke's music in April 1969 at an underground concert given in the Gnessin Institute in Moscow by Alexei Lyubimov (piano), Boris Berman (piano), Lev Mikhailov (clarinet) and a few string players. This half-forbidden concert, organized by Alexander Ivashkin, was all that remained of a whole festival, which had been cancelled at the last moment by the authorities. The concert was split into three parts, the first two of them dedicated to the music of the Soviet avant-garde, with compositions by the likes of Edison Denisov, Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov, Viktor Ekimovsky and Kuldar Sink etc. At the end of the second part there was a perfonnance of Schnittke's Serenade for five musicians. This very cheerful and fanny piece, entangled with hundreds of short quotations, sounded very different from the rest of the program. The final part of the concert contained works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, played for the first time in Brezhnev's Soviet Union.

Apologia

When Péter Eötvös was in Brussels in October 2000, conducting Janáćek's The Makropouhs Case at the Theatre de la Monnaie, I met him one morning to discuss his opera Three Sisters. The conversation, which took place in Hungarian and which I recorded, lasted for over 90 minutes.

Like many other composers, Andrzej Panufnik lost his entire musical oeuvre as a result of the Warsaw Uprising. By then he was already the composer of two symphonies, a piano trio, the Five Polish Peasant Songs and Tragic Overture. This last piece, which he had conducted himself in occupied Warsaw in 1944, had brought him considerable success. Listeners felt its terrifying resonance inaddition to appreciating its masterful construction, and the event remained in many people's memory for years, establishing Panufnik's musical position as a composer as well as a conductor. (Before the war, he had graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory with degrees in both fields, and later studiedconducting at Vienna's Hochschule fur Musik with one of the greatest conductors of the time, FelixWeingartner.) His pre-war compositions, premiered in the late 1930s, had already been very well received by the critics. There was no doubt that Panufnik would play a significant role in post-war Polish musical life.

Leonid Desyatnikov is one of the most successful Russian composers of his generation and one of the most distinctive and individual on the contemporary Russian scene. He represents a rare instance of a contemporary composer in his mid-forties who has had all his works performed, some of them on many occasions. In the West, his music has been played by the Deutsche Sym-phony and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. His vocal cycle Five poems by F. Tyutchev has been performed recently in London and Aldeburgh. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Gidon Kremer became the main champion of Desyatnikov's music; he has commissioned, performed and recorded a number of Desyatnikov's original works as well as his arrangements of Astor Piazzolla's music. To date, Kremer has performed Desyatnikov's Russian Seasons, for violin, female voice and string orchestra, composed in 2000, fifteen times in Europe, the Baltic countries and Russia. On 1 May 2002, he will present its American premiére at Carnegie Hall. The fact that Kremer, who earlier brought the music of such composers as Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina to international attent ion, has now ‘chosen’ Desyatnikov speaks volumes for the quality of the music.

• The Shostakovich-Glickman Letters Alexander Ivashkin

• The Finzi-Ferguson Correspondence Peter Palmer

• Derrick Puffett on Music Chris Walton

• Bengt Hambraeus Guy Richards

• Barbican: John Adams Weekend Robert Stein

• South Bank: ‘Thwarted Voices’ Malcolm Miller

• Birmingham: Edward Rushton's ‘Palaces’ Clement Jewitt

• Barbican: Glass premières Robert Stein

• Birmingham: Clement Jewitt Raymond Head

• Wigmore Hall: Shostakovich for viola Malcolm Miller

• Berlin: Norbert von Hannenheim and Schoenberg's Masterclass David Drew

• Myaskovsky's Symphonies Calum MacDonald

• Nancarrow and Antheil Peter Quinn

• Swiss Music Peter Palmer

• Skalkottas's 32 Piano Pieces Guy Rickards

• Extended Feldman John Warnaby

• Ben Johnston Mark R. Taylor

• Heino Eller Peter Quinn

• Michael Finnissy's Verdi Transcriptions John Warnaby

• Leonard Salzedo Jill Barlow

• Operatic Round-Up Martin Anderson

• Composers; Books received