Witold Lutoslawski is one of the foremost creators of contemporary music, and as a Pole he has attained a rank second only to Chopin. His art is recognized as a brilliant contribution to the European musical heritage, and he has gained the reputation of a contemporary classic – the reward for many decades of painstaking effort to construct and develop his own vision of music.

Peter Sculthorpe's career has been one of remarkable unity of vision and consistency of purpose. From the start, he set out to create a music which, while universal in content, would be specifically Australian in its idiom. At the time he was growing up, this was not an over-simplistic aim, especially when Sculthorpe looked at the music then being written in Australia and saw that, by and large, it was hopelessly dependent on European manners and cultural traditions that could only be acquired at second-hand. Australians were then, and still are, in the process of self-discovery; the best Australian artists have learned that their own country can provide them with richer material for their work than can distant Europe. Painters, especially, have found the extraordinary Australian landscape, where trees shed their bark instead of their leaves, and prehistoric animals roam in a red desert, a potent source of inspiration. Even in the 19th century the painters of the Heidelberg school, in responding to the glaring Australian light, produced work quite different in feeling from the French Impressionists who were their models. In the 20th century a true national school has come into being, whose major figures have all helped to define the Australian landscape's peculiar strangeness – Lloyd Rees, Russell Drysdale, Fred Williams, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan.

Throughout his life Robert Simpson has been fascinated by two aspects of the music of the great Viennese classical composers: their handling of large-scale tonality, and their handling of rhythm. It has been his abiding ambition to recapture the sense of energy that Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven produced, and which has been largely lost since then. He has wanted, for example, to discover what makes a Beethoven Adagio or Scherzo, or a Haydn Finale, so utterly characteristic rhythmically. As a means of exploring this he has set himself various tasks. He wrote his First Symphony, for example, with a basic pulse throughout, upon which contrasting tempi are achieved by varying the pace of thought. This method is found in subsequent works, for example the Second, Seventh and Eleventh String Quartets, the second movement of the Third Symphony, and most of the Sixth. In these works tonality, as it is generally understood, is a potent force.

More than half a century ago I published, while still a student, an essay about the music of Jean Wiéner. When, ten years later, some of my adolescent journalism was collected into book form I omitted the Wiéner piece, partly because by then it seemed to me rather ‘young mannish’, partly because by then the composer appeared to have become a casualty of oblivion's poppy. So it was surprising, early this year, to light upon a new French double album recording of Wiéner's piano works. Listened to, the music turned out to retain the oddity and charm I'd recognized in it as a young man. It seems that although Wiéner virtually relinquished ‘serious’ composition around 1930, he did not in fact retire, but rather diverted his energies into popular music and film scores: fields for which his natural talents, as hinted in my original article, admirably fitted him. Moreover, he occasionally emerged from those more commercial worlds to compose another ‘art’ work, always of retrospective and usually of elegiac caste. These discs embrace two of the 1920s pieces I'd written about so many years ago; two sizeable sonata-style works written in the 1970s; and two small samplings of his film and pop music, pianistically arranged by the talented young player Omar Yagoubi, who seems to have been the instigator of the project. He plays the music with appropriate verve, though without scrupulous attention to the composer's notations. One might argue that that is acceptable because Wiéner is so quixotic a temperament; on the other hand one might also say that his notations wouldn't have been so meticulous had he not intended them to be respected.

On the first page of Allen Edwards' article ‘Unpublished Bouleziana at the Paul Sacher Foundation’, it was claimed in footnote 4 that the UE Buch der Klaviermusik des 20. Jahrhunderts (1967), catalogue number UE 12050, is out of print. Universal Edition (London) Ltd have asked us to point out that the volume is in fact still in print and readily available worldwide, and we apologize to UE for this involuntary misrepresentation.