Robert Simpson died on 21 November 1997, leaving behind him an impressive body of works. At its core are 11 symphonies and 15 string quartets; also three concertos, two string quintets, sonatas, some choral music, even some much admired pieces for brass band. While a thoroughly individual, music-as-process modernism imbues all he wrote, the prevailing image of Simpson is that of the conservative classicist, clinging to the apparent certainties of antiquated forms and diatonic tonality – a view that begins to some extent with the composer himself. He is widely known for his influential writings on Beethoven, Nielsen, and Bruckner among others; writings that, along the way, fiercely and polemically extol the enduring virtues of symphonic composition, manifestly swimming against the tide of contemporary music of the mid-century. Simpson's symphonism was always ideologically opposed to the post-war trends towards total mechanization, as much as to the experiments with extreme irrationality and chance in the 1960s.

Gustav Holst's The Hymn of Jesus (written in August 1917) has always been one of his most widely performed works. Its first performance in London in 1920 was an outstanding success; Vaughan Williams, the dedicatee, said he just ‘wanted to get up and embrace everyone and then get drunk’. Yet perhaps it is taken too much for granted. There remains the mystery why Holst chose to set an obscure Gnostic text in ancient Greek at a time of national catastrophe in the First World War. What was he offering his audience?

In a photograph reproduced in A Scrap-book for the Holst Birthplace Museum, the leading lights of the 1928 Whitsun Festival at Canterbury Cathedral are pictured. Posing in the sunshine after a performance of The Coming of Christ, Masefield's modern mystery play with music by Gustav Holst, are 30-odd participants with the Dean, Dr George Bell, and Holst in the centre. Between Holst and Mrs Bell, and taller than either, sits an efficient-looking lady in her early thirties, clearly of some importance to the festival. This was Jane Marian Joseph, who first came under Holst's spell as a pupil at St Paul's Girls' School and had gone on to act out the principles for which he stood, not least in her meticulous organization of these festivals, and as a composer. After her untimely death, he was to describe her as ‘the best girl pupil I ever had’ in an assessment of her compositions.

A fragment of an interview, really. Denis Aplvor began talking on tape early in 1998, when blindness made letter writing impossible. He talked about Margot Fonteyn and Bernard van Dieren and Federico García Lorca and old girl friends and being a doctor in India during the war. Mostly he talked about his music. This is ten minutes of conversation lifted from 16 hours of tape.

Alun Hoddinott has written music steadily for 50 years and, as a constantly prolific composer, has amassed an impressively wide-ranging body of work: six operas, ten symphonies, 20 concertos, a dozen piano sonatas, five violin sonatas, with vocal, choral, orchestral and instrumental works of equal abundance – in all, an output of about 300 works with which even his most ardent admirer will have found it difficult to keep up.

(This is the second of two interviews Vera Lukomsky conducted with Sofia Gubaidulina while she was Annual Guest Composer during the festival of her music which took place at San Jose State University School of Music, California in April 1995. The first interview, ‘The Eucharist in my fantasy’, appeared in Tempo 206. In this second interview, recorded at Gubaidulina's hotel on 5 April 1995, she talks more about her technical procedures, especially regarding structural proportion. The interview took place in Russian and is here presented in Vera Lukomsky's English translation.)

• Barbican: Gubaidulina's ‘Canticle of the Sun’ Robert Stein

• Cleveland: Lindberg's ‘Cantigas’ Stephen Long

• London Sinfonietta: Gisey, Rihm, Boulez John Warnaby

• American Music Wilfrid Mellers

• Rautavaara narrating with 12 tones (and CDs) Guy Richards

• Harrison Birtwistle in recent years Robert Adlington

• Macmillan's ‘Triduum’ Stephen Johnson

• John McCabe: Quartets and Piano Music Michael Oliver

• Recent Finnissy discs Jonathan Cross

• Barry Guy Mark Cromar

• John Adams Peter Quinn

• Schnittke Ronald Weitzman

• Kancheli andTerteryan Edward McKeon

• Radulescu's Piano Concerto Mark Taylor

• An Anglo-Celtic Miscellany Calum MacDonald

• Boulez's ‘Repons’ John Warnaby

• Brian, Foulds, Pott Martin Anderson