It is evident by now that swift political changes have had an impact on music scholarship in Russia. A radical shift from rejection to appreciation of the music of Russian early 20th-century modernists was announced on the pages of Sovetskaia Muzyka in January, 1991, where the following admission appeared: ‘By silencing the activities of the musicians of the Russian avantgarde for a prolonged period of time, we have in essence artificially narrowed the complex panorama of our music history.’ In the case of Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets, the process of historical revision has included recent publication and re-publication by Muzyka of some of his piano and chamber music. At a time when paper shortage is critical in Russia, such an effort demonstrates a sincere commitment to acknowledging his work. Certainly, another welcome result of this new attitude has been access, though apparently still limited, to the Roslavets archives in Moscow. The valuable information contained therein provides biographical details which finally allow for a substantiated and more definitive statement on the life of this composer who figured so prominently among the Russian modernists.

It seems one has to start with Isobel Gowdie. Whatever neophobic propogandists may say, there have been warm receptions for other new works at Promenade Concerts, but the thunderous, ecstatic welcome given to James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the 1990 Proms was unprecedented. What made it more remarkable was that this was a capacity Saturday night audience, largely attracted – or so one presumes – by Beethoven's Fourth Symphony and the prospect of hearing the brilliant young Korean violinist Dong Suk-Kang play the Sibelius Violin Concerto. What proportion of that audience was further lured by the picture in the Proms brochure of the good-looking young man, posing moodily in front of the Glasgow Celtic football ground, and the article underneath, with its promise of a heady mixture of catholic-socialist-Scottish indignation, is anybody's guess – but it can't have been the majority.

Ernest Newman devoted so much of his life to writing about Wagner that many people, the times being anti-Wagnerian, regarded him as a brilliant musical scholar who had unfortunately become limited by a fixed obsession. In his earlier days, he produced important studies of Gluck, Beethoven, Liszt, Strauss, and Wolf; but in later life he seemed to be interested only in one composer. Concerning his articles in The Sunday Times, someone concocted an amusing clerihew:

Next week, said Ernest Newman,

I shall write about Schumann;

But when next week came,

It was Wagner, just the same.

During the four years of servitude under German occupation, French musicians had to fight with unflinching determination to prevent their music from becoming submerged by Nazi influence. The Nazis pounced on Radio Paris at the very beginning of their occupation and used the Station for their own artistic propaganda. At that time, this Post had the best symphony orchestra in France and the artists engaged were in the first rank. The Nazis brought their own music and artists from Germany to Paris. Dr. Piersig, who was Goebbels' counterpart in the realm of music, propagated the superiority of German music. He pointed out that the beauty and influence of French music were on the decline as was the power of the State. The Nazis took complete control of the two opera houses in Paris and decided which operas should be performed. In actual fact, French artists had to perform a new German opera and ballet five times a year. In 1942 the Nazis presented Pfitzner's ‘Palestrina,’ an elaborate work in four acts. Werner Egk, one of the younger Germans, presented another opera, ‘Peer Gynt,’ based on Ibsen. It was translated into French and played by French artists. Both at the Paris Opéra and the Opéra-Comique a high proportion of the seats was reserved for German officers and their wives.

We have not been so annoyed by a tendentious pronoun since Vaughan Williams used it in “Do we want to hear old music as its composers intended?”, for WE regard Cosi as Mozart's loveliest score, with its exquisite serenade-band trellised by the strings and its wealth of vintage lyricism; not even poor productions and bad singers have yet turned it into a long evening for US. Beethoven thought that Mozart wasted musical riches upon the improbable and immoral, but we excuse the narrowness of genius when it may be responsible for the ethical rapture of the best parts of Fidelio. (An improbable and immoral work, WE think. Speech days and open days arranged by prison authorities just to indulge a taste for choruses? And what a scurvy treatment of the lower sort of people! How these lofty democratic puritans kow-tow to the nobs!) WE do not share Mr. Kerman's moral values, and as he is not Beethoven we merely want to smack him when he is rude.

It used to be said that we study history for the lessons we can learn for the present: ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’. But now that the music of the past occupies the centre-stage—with contemporary work getting the walk-on parts—perhaps we should reverse this, and ask how far the past can be illuminated by what happens today.

If one were seeking a metaphor for Ave Mavis Stella from among one's familiar musical experience, all the signs would point to a late Beethoven quartet. Of course the analogy between a string quartet and a sextet of mixed timbre is not literal, while the comparison of a work not yet two years old with some of the most visionary pieces ever written could be misconstrued, even if one swore it was only for analytical purposes as one was dragged screaming away to serve a five-year term for pretentiousness. But fortunately real affinity among composers and between pieces of music is not a function of our historical neuroses, and there are encouraging signs that sensitive and aware listeners can hear that it is not. One such friend of mine, having just heard Ave Maris for the second time, remarked that the first hearing some months earlier had thrown him into a kind of ‘2001’ outer space, while at the second hearing he realized he was listening to an absolutely classical piece of chamber music. In fact, as we will see, his two statements are very far from antithetical. At any rate, there is every reason to hope that such a listener, given a finite number of further hearings, would himself make the jump from ‘an absolutely classical piece of chamber music’ to ‘a late Beethoven quartet’ without any difficulty.

The Carl Rosa Opera, the only all-touring opera company left in the world in this age of high travelling costs, has fallen on difficult days. No doubt the provincial British cities should count themselves lucky that any opera company visits them at all. In the United States, Fortune Gallo's San Carlo Opera Company, which used to cross the continent with productions as good as the Carl Rosa's pre-war best, has not been on the move for more than a decade, and the only itinerant spectacles of the kind are packaged single operas sent out from time to time by various New York concert managers.

Faced with his latest composition—Cantata, finished in 1952—persistent opponents of Strawinsky will probably again speak in terms of the “funeral baked meats of former styles,” especially as this time the baked meats, both literary and musical, bear an early Elizabethan label—an Elizabethanism, of course, to which Strawinsky has given (as always) a subtle modern twist.

Like his name he was both dapper and ungainly. His clothes came from Lanvin but were unpressed; his hands were scrubbed, but the fingernails were bitten to the bone. His physiognomy showed a cross between weasel and trumpet, and featured a large nose through which he wittily spoke. His sunswept apartment on the Luxembourg was elegantly toned in orange plush, but the floors squeaked annoyingly. His social predilections were for duchesses and policemen, though he was born and lived as a wealthy bourgeois. His villa in Noizay was austere and immaculate, but surrounded by densely careless arbors. There he wrote the greatest vocal music of our century, all of it technically impeccable—and truly vulgar. He was deeply devout and uncontrollably sensual.

When the second world war began, arrangements for the celebration of Strauss's seventy-fifth birthday had been completed despite the shadows cast by the approaching catastrophy. They culminated in performances of six Strauss operas which, given before an audience still international in character at the Munich State Opera in August 1939, testified to the endeavours of Clemens Kraus and his collaborators to produce Strauss's stage works in exemplary performances with the composer's closest collaboration as to his final intentions in respect of style. During the first years of the war it was possible to extend this plan, and in October 1942 the ninth of Strauss's operas, ‘Capriccio,’ was first performed in Munich. The outbreak of war took Strauss by surprise in Baden (Switzerland); and in the course of discussing the opera the composer revealed his deep concern at the disaster which the Hitler régime had brought about, and his contention that the war would end in catastrophy for Germany.

What next indeed! Since his 90th birthday in December 1998, Elliott Carter has turned out a stream of works that are as personal and inventive as ever – if not more so. In addition to significant miniatures for solo piano, solo violin and string quartet, Carter has written his first settings of Italian poems (Tempo e tempi), his first concerto grosso (Askö Concerto) and, most surprising of all, his first opera, What Next? with a libretto by Paul Griffiths. (And a Cello Concerto – for Yo-yo Ma – is well underway.)

From the moment Schoenberg saw the need to use the designations Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme, the issue of differentiating material in complex post-tonal scores has been significant. It has formal and textural connotations, and it relates directly to the experience of listening to this music.

BROUWER: Aurolucent Circles (Percussion Concerto); Mandala; Remembrances; Sizzle. Evelyn Glennie (perc), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra c. Gerard Schwarz. Naxos 8.559250.

BAUER: Lament on African Themes; Concertino for oboe clarinet and strings; Trio Sonata No.1; Symphonic Suite for strings; Duo for oboe and clarinet; American Youth Concerto. Ambache Chamber Orchestra and Ensemble. Naxos 8.559253.

KIM: Violin Concerto; Dialogues for piano and orchestra; Cornet for narrator and orchestra. Cecylia Arzewski (vln), William Wolfram (pno), Robert Kim (narr), RTE National Symphony Orchestra c. Scott Yoo. Naxos 8.559226.

LEVY: Symphony No. 3; Cello Concerto No. 2; Rondo Tarantella; A Summer Overture. Scott Ballantyne (vlc), RTE National Symphony Orchestra c. Takuo Yuasa. Naxos 8.559234.

Stephen Dodgson (born in London, 1924) is not so much a neglected composer as a quintessentially English one, with a quizzical sense of humour, who has never really courted a mass audience. He is often described as ‘a performer's composer’, responding to commissions from colleagues and prominent artists connected with the Royal College of Music, where he taught harmony to, among others, guitarist John Williams back in the 1950s. His connexion also with Julian Bream led to his lifelong love-affair with the guitar, despite the fact that Dodgson never played the instrument himself. His resulting two Guitar Concertos (1959 and 1972) gained instant international recognition. At Dodgson's 80th Birthday celebration concert at the Royal Academy of Music on 29 February, Head of Guitar Studies Michael Lewin said in his introduction that: ‘no single composer who is a non-guitarist has contributed in such a major way to the guitar repertoire, and in such varied genres’.

Until the world première of Joe Duddell's Ruby on 25 July, I had yet to hear a percussion concerto which didn't trip itself up. I thought it was in the nature of the beast: the orchestra develops some material, which is then passed to the percussion, at which point all development perforce stops. Duddell (b. 1972) solved the problem by turning it on its head, and limiting the orchestral material to what the solo percussionist could handle; the downside is that he necessarily limits the expressive scope of the orchestra. Ruby – the title is simply a rhyming-slang working label that stuck: it's the final part of a trilogy of works written for the percussionist Colin Currie – opens with a vibraphone pattern that suggests a lyrical music-box and soon shows a stylistic affinity with American minimalism, which alternates with slabs of good-natured energy. The slow movement begins with tremolo marimba chords over string lines that drift aimlessly and agreeably, with a more active central section spurred by brief brass figures which trigger rising scalic patterns in the vibraphone. The initial material returns with soft-centred strings above hypnotic vibraphone figuration and is sung to a close by the rapturous sound of bowed vibraphone chords. The finale likewise deals in cheerfully mesmeric vibraphone patterns over a wash of strings and stuttering comment from horns and trumpets; the soloist then offers an improvised toccata on drum-kit backed by forceful rhythms from a near-tutti orchestra. The vibraphone resumes its jolly prattle until, seemingly having run out of things to say, the music just stops dead. Currie, supported by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under the functional Marin Alsop, played it with obvious commitment, and from memory – no small achievement in such motoric music.

Three new piano works premiered at the 2014 Proms showed an intriguing variety of styles and idioms in twenty-first-century music with varying levels of success. Paradoxically the more inventive piano techniques emerged in the more vividly characterised and communicative works by Judith Weir and Zhou Long, while Bernard Rands' neo-modernist concerto lacked a clear identity.