In a project that will be completed in 2007, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has been commissioned by the Naxos recording company to write ten string quartets. Large-scale ambitions already realized, the intimacy of chamber music offers an opportunity not only to consolidate but also to probe and quest with the precision of scaled-down forces. It is timely, then, to be reminded that, although it has not been a major preoccupation such as opera, concerto and symphony writing, the quartet form has drawn from him some significant examples evincing an original approach. A recent Metier release usefully gathers together on one disc all Max's works for string quartet prior to the Naxos series. In these persuasive recordings, the members of the Kreutzer Quartet display a keen understanding of the individual character of each piece, the circumstances of its creation and the purpose for which it was intended.

MORTON GOULD: Symphony No. 2. HARBISON: Cello Concerto1. STUCKY: Son et Lumière. GABRIEL GOULD: Watercolors2. 1David Finckel (vlc), 2Robert Sheena (cor anglais), Albany Symphony Orchestra c. David Alan Miller. Albany TROY 605.

McKINLEY: Violin Concerto1; Symphony of Winds; Sinfonie Concertante2. 1Janet Packer (vln), Warsaw National Philharmonic c. Jerzy Svoboda, 2Silesian Philarmonic Orchestra c. Joel Suben. MMC2119.

McKINLEY: Wind, Fire, and Ice1; Mostly Mozart2; Silent Whispers3. 1Victoria Griswold (pno), London Symphony Orchestra c. Roger Briggs, 2Royal Liverpool Philharmonic c. Gerard Schwarz, 3Warsaw Philharmonic c. Robert Black. MMC2134.

McKINLEY: Symphony No. 6, Prague1. STEWART: Scherzo. BIGGS: Salutation. ROSSI: Moon-Mirror. 1Roman Janal (bar), Czech Radio Symphony c. Vladimir Valek. MMC2123.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's conductor, Sakari Oramo, took up the cause of the long-neglected and little-regarded British composer John Foulds (1880–1939) in the late 1990s, as soon as he was appointed to his present post. This February saw his most high-profile push on Foulds's behalf so far, with performances of three Foulds works – one of them a UK and concert première, another a world première – in three Symphony Hall concerts, two of them broadcast on BBC Radio 3. This was followed by a CD recording for Warner Classics of these three pieces plus a fourth, Foulds's early elegy for violin and orchestra, Apotheosis. Intervening in one of the pre-concert talks, Oramo stated his conviction that after decades of misunderstanding during his lifetime, and half a century of neglect thereafter, ‘we owe it to this remarkable composer to play his music – and play it often’. It is difficult to think that any London orchestra would dare to programme anything so distant from their narrow core repertoire and so utterly contrary to contemporary fashions. Yet three near-capacity audiences were plainly both surprised and enthralled by the music, and many members of the public expressed a desire to hear more.

What better event to proclaim the potential of Los Angeles's new Walt Disney Concert Hall than a bicentennial celebration of the birth of Berlioz with Simon McBurney's Theatre de Complicité of London and Esa-Pekka Salonen's Los Angeles Philharmonic?

The idea of commissioning modern preludes to preface well established pillars of the classical repertoire has apparently been done a few years ago with soft new sounds gracing the air as audiences picnicked as a lead up to performances of Mozart's operas at Glyndebourne. Conversely one hears of The Departure of the Queen of Sheba, and other novelties. However, when conductor George Vass, musical director of the Presteigne Festival, commissioned three modern preludes to Handel's Messiah, to celebrate his tenth anniversary at the festival (2002), this must qualify as a ‘first’, and his brainchild. The Presteigne Festival is well known for its commitment to contemporary classical music. This was an ideal opportunity to commission three major British composers, to make their own 21st century ‘commentaries’ on Messiah, using the same instrumental forces available to Handel. As he also directs St Albans Choral Society, they put on the Messiah 25 October 2003, at St Albans Cathedral, prefaced by the three new preludes in the presence of two of the composers, Cecilia McDowall and David Matthews, using Orchestra Nova from the Presteigne Festival.

Since my last communication to Tempo was a detailed examination of a piece of programme-making that showed today's BBC at its most culturally clueless and journalistically inept, I hope I may now be permitted to make some public acknowledgement of a more recent broadcast that can only be described as a truly splendid piece of work.

An opera which runs for less than an hour and has 20 solo parts might seem destined to remain unperformed, but Scottish composer David Johnson's Sorry, False Alarm was composed as a training opera for students, and a workshop production by singers from Trinity College of Music (24 March, Greenwich) demonstrated that it fits its purpose admirably.

Film music, often considered a ‘Cinderella’ art-form, is really more of a ‘Sleeping Beauty’: to a ‘first approximation’, its entire history exists on films which we are never shown. Prefatory to the 2003 Musicians Benevolent Fund Royal Concert on 4 November, however, the Barbican cinema presented an early-evening resuscitation of no fewer than four long-dormant items connected in some way with Vaughan Williams, two of whose orchestral works were programmed to follow.

For a composer to be able to have a fiftieth birthday concert of his own music is an achievement, but to have those works performed with dedication and enthusiasm by a host of different choirs, ensembles and soloists, including many children, students, as well as colleagues, and enjoyed by a capacity crowd, is an even greater tribute. Malcolm Singer's 50th Birthday Concert on 13 October 2003 was just such an occasion, featuring as it did a world première and second performance, in a programme that spanned from an early graduation work to recent choral and instrumental commissions. What emerged was a stylistic thread and aesthetic integrity, a predilection for quasi-minimalist processes, energetic rhythmic polyphony, and a keen sense of expressive shape that gives Singer a unique place in the pantheon of postmodernism. Above all the works radiated a practical expertise that derives from Singer's experience as an all-round musician. Currently Director of Music at the Yehudi Menuhin School, Surrey, he is an accomplished conductor and teacher who has produced a large oeuvre in almost every genre, including children's music.

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’.

Murray McLachlan's première of Erik Chisholm's Sonata in A minor on 4 January marked the centenary of Chisholm's birth (in Cathcart, outside Glasgow) to the day itself. Chisholm was a considerable force for good while he was busy in Scotland: the first British performances of Les Troyens, Béatrice et Bénédicte and Idomeneo; visits to his ‘Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music’ in Glasgow from Bartók, Casella, Schmitt, Sorabji (a close friend), Szymanowski and other luminaries. But he could, apparently, be a difficult man, and with his posting to Singapore by ENSA in 1943, to conduct the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and subsequent nomination to the chair of the music department of the University of Cape Town in 1946, his native land seems to have been content to forget the outsized personality whom Arnold Bax called ‘the most progressive composer that Scotland has produced’.

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’.

Philippe Hersant (b. 1948 in Rome, graduated Paris Conservatoire, studied with André Jolivet), has been working with the French national radio station France-Musique since 1973 and has received many honours as composer in France. In February 2004 Radio France presented a ‘retrospective’ of his prolific output as well as the première of his Violin Concerto, a Radio France commission. His new opera, Le Maine Noir, based on Anton Chekov's story, will be premièred in May 2005.