Although John Pickard's music has received a good many performances and radio broadcasts over the past decade, it was the relay of his dazzling orchestral tone poem The Flight of Icarus (1990) during the 1996 Proms1 which brought him to the notice of the wider concert–going and –listening public. There is some justice in that piece attracting such attention, as it is one of his most immediate in impact, while completely representative of his output at large. That output to date encompasses three symphonies (1983–4, 1985–7, 1995–6) and five other orchestral works, three string quartets (1991, 1993, 1994; a fourth in progress), a piano trio (1990), sonatas for piano (1987) and cello and piano (1994–5), vocal and choral works, pieces for orchestral brass (Vortex, 1984–5) and brass band – the exhilarating Wildfire (1991), which crackles, hisses and spits in ferocious near–onomatopoeia, and suite Men of Stone (1995), celebrating four of the most impressive megalithic sites in Britain, one to each season of the year. There are other works for a variety of solo instruments and chamber ensembles, such as the intriguing grouping of flute, clarinet, harpsichord and piano trio in Nocturne in Black and Gold (1983) and the large–scale Serenata Concertante for flute and six instruments of a year later. Still in his mid-thirties – he was born in Burnley in 1963 – Pickard has already made almost all the principal musical forms of the Western Classical tradition his own, with only opera, ballet and the concerto as yet untackled.

A large body of Michael Finnissy's work refers to music, texts and other aspects of culture outside the mainstream European tradition. As a child he met Polish and Hungarian friends of the family, and was further attracted to aspects of Eastern European music when asked to transcribe Yugoslav music from a record, for a ballet teacher. Study of anthropological and other literature led him to a conviction that folk music lay at the roots of most other music, and related quite directly to the defining nature of man's interaction with his environment. Finnissy went on to explore the widest range of folk music and culture, from Sardinia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, the Kurdish people, Azerbaijan, the Vendan Africans, China, Japan, Java, Australia both Aboriginal and colonial, Native America and more recently Norway, Sweden, Denmark, India, Korea, Canada, Mexico and Chile.

On the face of it, Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony are two works which could hardly have less in common. Even the one feature they might be said to share at the outset – some form of E minor tonality – has come to divide them by the end: the Baroqueperiod work concludes not in the starting key but in a ‘progressive’ C minor, and it is, curiously, the 20th-century symphony which not only returns to its original tonic but also makes use of the Baroque feature of the ‘picardy third’.

Just about the strongest, most honest and individual composing talent anywhere. It's music that gets one by the ears, by the throat, by the nerve-ends, and never leaves one the same after as before hearing it – all without obvious rhetoric, and with no attempt at stylistic hectoring, sledgehammering or attempting to take any sort of political, social, moral or even artistic stance. It's music which is complete of itself; it doesn't go out of its way to court or manipulate the listener – the listener is drawn in, if at all, by the music's own pure poetry. Especially his own is the duende quality, the dark fire, the quasi-demonic impishness that all his music has…

In spring 1975 the British composer and writer Bill Hopkins completed an orchestration of Debussy's Lindaraja. Paul Griffiths has reported that Hopkins believed this to be ‘the only one of Debussy's piano works which was intended as a sketch of an orchestral composition’. As an expert on both French music and orchestration, Hopkins was admirably qualified for the job. But as we have no written record of his ideas on the subject we need to analyze the musical evidence as it stands, to see what might justify his view of the piece.

• James Macmillan's ‘Ninian’ Ronald Weitzman

• ‘The Max Factor’ Paul Conway

• Pfitzner's ‘Palestrina’ Guy Rickards

• Lachenmann's ‘Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern’ John Wamaby

• Oxford Contemporary Music Festival Raymond Head

• Diana Burrell's ‘Symphonies’ Paul Conway

• Vasks and Hakola in Kaustinen Paul Rapoport

• Speak Low (Weill/Lenya Letters) Robin Holloway

• Busoni Teaching New Classicality Marc-André Roberge

• Ivashkin's Schnittke biography Ronald Weitzman

• Ruth Crawford Nicolas Hodges

• Roberto Gerhard's ‘Duenna’ Antony Bye

• Maxwell Davies's last Strathclydes John Wamaby

• Barrett, Finnissy, Payne on NMC Julian Anderson

• Oliver Knussen on DG David Denton

• Burrell, Woolrich, White, Gordon Michael Oliver

• Andriessen's ‘De Materie’ David Wright

• Thomas Adès's Life Story on EMI David Denton

• British Symphonists Guy Rickards

• Sony's ligeti Edition David Bass

• Marek and Kelterborn Peter Palmer

• Parry's Piano Music Tristram Pugin

• Buxton Orr's Trios Mark Doran

• Malipiero Quartets John CG Waterhouse