In a recent interview Elliott Carter reaffirmed his commitment to ‘modernism’, a concept which he went on to define – with respect to music – as ‘the concern with an expanded vocabulary which Stravinsky, Varése and Schoenberg introduced before the first world war – and after’. This ‘expanded vocabulary’ involved ‘Not only the whole field of dissonance, but also new points of view about rhythm and new sonorities’. Carter's musical modernism was also bound up with an awareness ‘that we were living in a world… completely changed by the writings of Freud’ and that ‘the whole sense of the subconscious and the conscious were much more intricately involved that we had thought’.

I first encountered the name of Grohg some 25 years ago on the sleeve of Morton Gould's marvellous Chicago Symphony recording of Aaron Copland's Dance Symphony of 1929. Copland had hastily extracted this score from an unperformed ballet (written in Paris in 1922–5) in order to enter a major competition organized by RCA Victor records, when he realized that he would be unable to complete the planned Symphonic Ode in time for the deadline. I found this music very attractive indeed – amusingly Ballets Russes-ian to be sure but, in the precision and transparency of its sound-world, very characteristic of its author and not at all suggestive of a first attempt at orchestration (Grohg pre-dates the Organ Symphony, which was the first orchestral music of his own that Copland actually heard). I was also intrigued by the idea of a ballet that had been suggested by F. W. Murnau's classic silent horror film Nosferatu (1922).

On 22 April 1944 Béla Bartók wrote to his son, Peter:

Spring has now indisputably arrived. A kind of ‘kutyafa’ (dogwood) is in bloom, like acacias flowering at home. The birds have become completely drunk with the spring and are putting on concerts the like of which I've never heard. They start with puty-puty-puty ./../../. and end up with various new bird sounds (clearly from later arrivals). The keeps on creating more and more variants.

Schoenberg's second opera, Die Glückliche Hand (1910–13), is a work of crucial importance for the understanding of the composer's subsequent development. Not only does it foreshadow the later and incomplete Die Jakobsleiter, but in reaching out into related artistic fields it brings together for the first time in Schoenberg's career a number of threads that were to be of great significance for him both as man and creator.

• Carter's ‘Partita’ in Chicago Phil Lesh

• ‘Blond Eckbert’ Malcolm Miller

• Errollyn Wallen's New Percussion Concerto Guy Richards

• Gubaidulina in the Canaries Gerard McBurney

• Ronald Corp's ‘Laudamus’ Laurence Hughes

• Two Lutoslawski books Patric Standford

• Janáček Intimate Letters Michael Oliver

• Poulenc by Mellers David Wright

• Eugene Goossens Lewis Foreman

• ‘Gloriana’ and ‘The Beggar's Opera’ Robin Holloway

• ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ Michael Oliver

• Goldschmidt's ‘Der gewaltige Hahnrei’ Ronald Weitzman

• Malipiero's Symphonies Bret Johnson

• Havergal Brian's Violin Concerto John Pickard

• Two new Allan Pettersson series Guy Rickards

• Morton Feldman Nicolas Hodges

• Nancarrow for live performers John Warnaby

• Irving Fine and other Americans Bret Johnson

• Stefan Wolpe Nicolas Hodges

• Philip Glass Mike Seabrook

• Icelandic orchestral music Guy Rickards

• Korngold Martin Anderson

• Koechlin Calum MacDonald