‘The Tend'rest Breast’: settings of women’s poetry by QUILTER, BRIDGE, GURNEY, LENNOX BERKELEY, IRELAND, ALASTAIR KING, MADELEINE DRING, MONTAGUE PHILLIPS. Georgina Colwell (sop), Nigel Foster (pno). Dunelm DRD0237.

‘Strings in the Earth and Air’: settings by MOERAN, WARLOCK, GEOFFREY STERN. Paul Martyn-West (ten), Nigel Foster (pno). Dunelm DRD0249.

The centenary year of one of the giants of 20th-century music has been and gone. It was all but ignored, so far as the UK is concerned, by his publishers, the musical establishment, the BBC etc. There had been vague plans to mount a number of relatively large-scale performances and broadcasts, to stage his two short operas for the first time and so on. They vanished. Music is a business like any other. Under the auspices of the Stefan Wolpe Society (USA), his daughter, the pianist Katharina Wolpe, managed to put together a short series of concerts in London recently, in which a few of his works received staggering performances before a very few people. The last of these, which would have seen the first performance for 2–3 decades of Wolpe's enormous Enactments for 3 pianos – had to be abandoned at the last minute for sudden lack of funds!

Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974–77) is one of the most successful operas of the 20th century in terms of the number of performances. Originally, Ligeti had intended to compose an ‘anti-opera’ in the manner of Kagel's Staatstheater, but changed his fundamental compositional approach during the process of composing the work. He realised that a more traditional opera with a clear narrative (unlike Kagel's avant-garde opera) was more suitable, and it therefore became necessary for him to transform his style to one in which the text was audible to an audience. As a result there is very little of his mature micropolyphonic technique in the resulting work, but rather there is an exploration of music from the past, and the use of parody. In composing his opera Ligeti revitalised his approach through a re-engagement with history, but combined with a modernist rigour; thus he was able to create a new and fruitful musical language, and to transform his compositional technique.

Messiaen's concept of ‘personnages’ is essential to his compositional and analytical thinking. Yet it is not described in his Technique of My Musical Language of 1944, and it features only sporadically in the secondary literature. There are references to personnages in Messiaen's booklet notes to recordings of the Turangalîla-symphonie, but only the basic premise of personnages rythmiques is discussed there. Messiaen's preliminary thoughts on the rhythmic aspect of the process are given in his 1939 article ‘Le rythme chez Igor Stravinsky’, but those two pages only permit fairly general comments and the label ‘personnages’ was not yet in use. We are introduced to personnages in detail at various points in his seven-volume Traité de rythme, de couleur et d'ornithologie – a compilation of Messiaen's writings from 1949 onwards, edited by Alain Louvier and Yvonne Loriod and published between 1994 and 2002, the order of material having been decided by Messiaen shortly before his death. For those patient enough to negotiate its convoluted presentation, the Traité allows the reader a unique insight into Messiaen's thought-processes, his musical and technical influences, analytical style, and non-musical interests. The present article seeks to disentangle and clarify the concept of personnages, to gather the threads from various analyses in the Traité in which they appear, and to trace their progress from Messiaen's Stravinsky analysis to a pinnacle of complexity in the Turangalîla-symphonie.

The toy piano is fast becoming a concert instrument in its own right, with its own (growing) body of repertoire that has moved well beyond John Cage's 1948 classic Suite for Toy Piano. There are dedicated musicians specialising in toy piano performance all over the world, and numerous composers producing new works written specifically for the toy piano. This unusual miniature instrument provides a respite from the traditional implications of the grand piano, breaks the ice with audiences and allows pianists to perform in locations that would otherwise be inaccessible. In this article the author introduces the history and mechanism of the instrument, performance considerations, extended techniques and approaches to working with electronics, recent repertoire and suggestions for performers and composers. Discussion is supplemented with musical examples.

Listening to Luigi Ferrari, the Wexford Opera Festival's outgoing Artistic Director, one cannot understand why many of the rare operas Wexford is famous for reviving are not staples of an often rather repetitive repertoire. Perhaps their problem is that, to a degree, they require an audience to think, rather than merely emote. That was Wagner's problem.

Christopher Butterfield is a composer and composition teacher. His music has been performed across Canada and in Europe, with recordings on the CBC, Artifact, and Collection QB labels. He is currently the Director of the School of Music in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria. Christopher was born in 1952 in Vancouver, BC. He studied composition at the University of Victoria with Rudolf Komorous and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with Bülent Arel. He was a performance artist, rock guitar player and composer while living in Toronto between 1977 and 1992, after which he returned to the University of Victoria as Assistant Professor of Composition.

I studied composition with Christopher between 2000 and 2005. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to sit down with him in Victoria. During our interview, I asked him about his life and work, and for his thoughts on how Czech-Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous has influenced composition in Canada over the last few decades.

A performer of Luigi Nono's late works is often faced with crucial questions regarding interpretation and technical details. An important tradition has evolved in performing these works, nevertheless it is not always easy to find the necessary information to play them adequately. This article attempts to answer some of the technical and interpretational questions in the context of Das atmende Klarsein and A Pierre – Dell'Azzurro silenzio, inquietum. Our hope is that it will contribute to the discussion about authenticity and freedom of interpretation and provide flutists with practical information not found in the scores.

My admiration for Michael Graubart's probing review of Hans Keller's Music and Psychology (Tempo Volume 58, No.227) is, I have to say, a little qualified by some of his censures over my editing. However, I agree that there are real issues at stake, and that some of these go beyond his own demonstrable errors: HK's piece on capital punishment on p. 31, for instance, is not appended ‘without explanation’, for the provenance is explained barely an inch above the text; the translators (Irene Auerbach and myself) are not ‘not named’, but are acknowledged on p. xix; and the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) will tell him that a ‘congress’ is not just ‘a meeting’ (the Congress of Vienna), but also a place of assembly (the US Congress) and a political movement (Trades Union Congress): from this last point of view ‘Zionist Congress’ is far from ‘misleading’.

London: Music We'd Like To Hear, March–April 2006

JOHN TAVENER: Schuon Lieder. Patricia Rozaro (sop), Gillian McDonagh (temple bowls), The Schubert Ensemble. Black Box BBM1101.

In recent years Liza Lim has emerged definitively as one of the finest composers of her generation. A series of major works, including Ecstatic Architecture, commissioned for the inauguration of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and her third opera, The Navigator have confirmed her possession of a voice that is versatile, evocative, deeply expressive and uncompromisingly modern.

SCHOENBERG: String Quartets Nos.1–4; String Quartet in D major; Presto in C major; Scherzo in F major. Aron Quartet (Ludwig Müller, Barna Kobori, Georg Hamann, Christophe Pantillon) with Anna Maria Pammer (sop). Preiser Records PR 90572 (3-CD set).

• John Joubert at 80 Paul Conway

• ‘Mr Emmet Takes a Walk’ Richard E. McGregor

• Christopher Fox Bernard Hughes

• Modern American Songs and Encores Peter Palmer

• Virgil Thomson's Cello Concertos Rodney Lister

• Reich's ‘Different Trains’ and ‘Piano Phase’ Bernard Hughes

• Egon Wellesz's complete piano music Paul Conway

• Milhaud's complete piano-orchestra works Bret Johnson

• David Briggs Jill Barlow

Varèse Rodney Lister

Since November 2004 Simon Emmerson has been Professor of Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, following 28 years as Director of the Electroacoustic Music studios at City University, London. As a composer he works mostly with live electronics; he has also completed purely electroacoustic commissions from the IMEB (Bourges) and the GRM (Paris). In addition to extensive writings on the subject, he was founder Secretary of EMAS (The Electroacoustic Music Association of Great Britain) in 1979, and served on the Board of Sonic Arts Network from its inception until 2004. He is a Trustee of its successor organisation ‘Sound and Music’. This interview took place in July 2008.

In 1986 I made six programmes about The Mysterious Art of the Conductor for the BBC's World Service. These derived from Interviews with nine conductors, among them Pierre Boulez, Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink and Charles Mackerras. Each programme lasted half-an-hour and included music examples. The interviews were much longer, but each was filleted and spliced so as to juxtapose – and sometimes contrast – the views of different conductors on particular aspects of their art. The interview with Pierre Boulez, reproduced here in full, was recorded in Broadcasting House on 25 October 1986. It gave me special pleasure and is, I believe, of special interest.