Boston's Symphony Hall is celebrated as one of the finest concert halls in the world. It is generally less well known that Boston also has the smaller and equally fine Jordan Hall, located in the New England Conservatory. A fixture of Boston's musical life, Jordan Hall is also literally the heart of the Conservatory, being the venue not only of visiting celebrity solo and chamber music recitals, but of a multitude of the whole range of the Conservatory's student concert activity.

FEINBERG: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1, op.1 (1915)1, 2, op.2 (1915–16)2, 3, op.3 (1916)2, 4, op.6 (1918)1, 5, op.10 (1920–21)1, 6, op.13 (1923)2. 1Nikolaos Samaltanos, 2Christophe Sirodeau (pnos). BIS-CD-1413.

FEINBERG: Piano Sonatas Nos. 7, op.21 (1924–28)2, 8, op.21a (1933–34)2, 9, op.29 (1939)1, 10, op.30 (1940–44)1, 11, op.40 (1952)1, 12, op.48 (1962)2. 1Nikolaos Samaltanos, 2Christophe Sirodeau (pnos). BIS-CD-1414.

ROGER SMALLEY: Poles Apart and other chamber works. Continuum Ensemble. NMC DO 83.

By all (press) accounts, the overture to The Tempest, Thomas Adès's first full-scale opera, was completed at speed – just five days before the 20 February première, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Comparisons with Rossini naturally followed, but the question remained whether such facility would be married to the necessary substance for a setting of Shakespeare's play Robin Holloway's claim (in the Financial Times) that the opera was ‘make or break’ for Adès may in hindsight come to appear somewhat overstated, but there is no doubt that this was an important milestone in the composer's career.

There's no doubt that Masterprize, the international composition competition with a mission ‘to bring music lovers and composers closer together’, is a slick and professional operation, with a tremendous outreach. The CD with the six pieces which made it to the final (of some 1,000 entries) was stuck on the front of both Gramophone and Classic FM magazines, with a joint print-run of around 100,000. The ‘gala final’ in the Barbican on 30 October, when the London Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Daniel Harding, was broadcast live on Classic FM (which reaches 6.5 million listeners a week), NPR in the States (16 million) and Radio Latvia (you tell me); and NPR also packaged it for their deferred ‘Symphony Cast’. These are scarcely believable figures for contemporary classical music: Masterprize is plainly doing an enormous amount of good. Another statistic worth celebrating is that 1,300 children were involved in the associated education project, playing the six works up and down the UK. It's just a pity that most of the music that made it through to the final was so dull, a post-Hollywood syrup of feel-good consonance and glittering over-orchestration – slickly wrapped empty boxes.

Not being a string player himself, Mark-Anthony Turnage approached his first concerto for a string instrument with some trepidation. It turns out that while the writing for the viola is idiomatic enough, Turnage has something of a love/hate relationship with traditional ideas about the concerto. Divided into two movements – Turnage admitted that in the unlikely event of his writing a symphony it would have three, five or six movements, never four – the new concerto (completed in 2001 and here given its UK première) has the expected cadenza but one that appears only 36 bars in! Such challenging attitudes to an old form characterize the new piece, subtitled On Opened Ground. Even so the work's structure – scherzando opening with slower coda, slow second movement and brisk chaconne finale – bring us back to the more usual reference points for a concerto. While he acknowledges the surprising influence of Walton ‘in the second movement’, the influence of that composer's own viola concerto is actually more pervasive than Turnage would have us believe. Even the title, while apparently making reference to Seamus Heaney's collection Opened Ground, seems to point more fruitfully to the ground bass of the second movement's chaconne. One thing is certainly as described: On Opened Ground is, as he claims, one of Turnage's most lyrical pieces and might win him an audience for whom the earlier astrigencies were too great.

The world première of Robin Holloway's String Quartet, given by the Endellion Quartet at the RNCM on 13 October 2003, came in the midst of a number of concerts around the country marking the composer's 60th birthday. (Let us not forget, too, Claridge Press's publication of Holloway's writings, also coinciding with this anniversary.) Clever programming between Haydn's quartet op. 76 no. 4 and Brahms's op. 51 no. 2, enabled one to appreciate Holloway's first essay in this genre in the context (on the one hand) of a composer for whom the string quartet was seemingly an effortless medium, and (on the other) of a composer on whom the quartet tradition weighed heavily. For Holloway too, the string quartet proved problematic, and almost unassailable – his highly biographical programme-note revealed an initial inability to engage with ‘this most hallowed of the classic media, with its incomparably rich literature’. This inhibition threatened to stifle work altogether, for it was only a final attempt in August 2003, after three ‘sterile years’ of trying, that Holloway found a way through the problems the string quartet posed him.

IAN WILSON: from the Book of Longing; BIG; Drive; Verschwindend; Spilliaert's Beach; For Eileen, after rain; Lim; A Haunted Heart. Hugh Tinney (pf), Catherine Leonard (vn). Riverrun RVRCD65.

Many of Justin Connolly's works have been premièred and recorded by Nicholas Hodges, whose musicianship provided the inspiration for Connolly's Piano Concerto (2001–2003). The form and character of the piece are influenced by the ancient idea of the labyrinth, the forces of soloist and orchestra being well suited to the roles of Theseus and the Minotaur, where one protagonist signifies the existence of the other and the distinction between hero and villain is not always apparent. The orchestral forces employed are unexceptional. Brass and percussion are divided into two separate groups to the left and right of the conductor, whilst the first horn player sits apart from his colleagues and is mirrored by a fourth, offstage, horn player.

It's been more than 40 years since Elliott Carter wrote a concertante work for piano and orchestra: the 1963 Piano Concerto was one of the high watermarks of the complexity and richness of his early maturity. His latest piece is Dialogues for piano and large ensemble, and at its dazzlingly expressive world premiere performance on 23 January, by its commissioners and dedicatees, pianist Nicolas Hodges and the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Oliver Knussen, the work was revealed as one of the most significant of Carter's recent catalogue.

LEE HYLA: Bass Clarinet Concerto1; Trans; Violin Concerto2. 1Tim Smith (bass cl), 2Laura Frautschi (vln), Boston Modern Orchestra Project c. Gil Rose. New World 80614-2

Next season James Levine ceases to be Music Director Designate of the Boston Symphony, and becomes the orchestra's Music Director and Conductor. Due to previous commitments, Levine has conducted only one program in each of the three seasons since he was named to the post. Celebration of his ascendency to the directorship of the orchestra has already begun, though, with the commissioning of works from a number of composers, including Milton Babbitt, John Harbison, and Yehudi Wyner, for his first season, restoring one of the proudest traditions of the BSO – that of the music director's active and enthusiastic promotion of contemporary orchestral compositions. It is not insignificant that this first season of the directorship of this American orchestra by an American conductor features American composers at a time when classical concert music seems to be about the only area of American life resistant to overt jingoism. Levine's earliest plans for the season included performing Elliott Carter's Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei, and, hoping to link the occasion and the BSO to the triptych, he commissioned from Carter a short introductory fantasy to that work, entitled Micomicón. This pendant received its première, preceding a performance of Partita, the first part of the Symphonia triptych, at Symphony Hall in January.

At least one institution of Germany's contemporary music scene looks likely to survive the government's current austerity schemes: Munich's Musica Viva series. The second concert of its 2003–4 season, held in Hercules Hall on 7 November, remained true to the great tradition of this venerable series by treating a packed auditorium to two world premières and the first German performance of a ‘modern classic’. Presiding at the rostrum with the Bavarian RSO was Musica Viva's current director Udo Zimmermann, himself a composer of note and an open-minded champion of the pan-European avantgarde. In a talk broadcast in the interval, Zimmermann emphasized the series' new alignment on co-operative ventures with other state broadcasting companies, specifically in France and the Baltic countries. Besides allowing radio orchestras to pool their straitened resources, this tactic also has the highly desirable advantage of giving further hearings to new works after their premières. The size and attentiveness of Zimmermann's audiences suggest that he has found the right tack to steer Musica Viva out of its doldrums of previous decades and through the cost-slashings of the new millennium.

CORIGLIANO: Symphony No. 2; The Mannheim Rocket. Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra c. John Storgårds. Ondine ODE10392

ROUSE: Violin Concerto1; Rapture; Der gerettete Alberich2. 1Cho-Liang Lin (vln), 2Evelyn Glennie (perc), Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra c. Leif Segerstam. Ondine ODE10162

HIGDON: Concerto for Orchestra; City Scape. Atlanta Symphony Orchestra c. Robert Spano. Telarc. CD80620 (Super Audio version SACD60620)