The relationship between the musical thinking of Gustav Mahler and Peter Maxwell Davies becomes ever more apparent, and in the ‘Second Fantasia on John Taverner's In Nomine’ it takes on crucial importance.

The connection manifests itself immediately in the two composers' attitudes towards ‘surface’. A musical image is an abstraction of psychic content and must be given corporeal identity before it is communicable. Musical composition is the crystallization of the image into specific note-configurations of pitch, rhythm, timbre, register, etc. which taken together comprise the surface of a work. The act of listening then reverses the process by going from the surface back to the image. Composition is translation and listening is retranslation.

The nature of feeling in Stravinsky's art, variously described as depersonalised, ritualistic or monumental, finds its epitome in the small memorial pieces which have appeared throughout his life. Here one can say that personal grief does not in the least affect the means of expression, yet paradoxically it is the music's sole raison d'être. With such an oblique relationship between personal feeling and artistic expression, it is not surprising that the composer's three most recent memorials, Epitaphium, Dirge Canons, and the new Elegy for JKF, find in the pre-compositionally determined factors of twelve-note serialism a most convincing discouragement to personal indulgence. It is even more instructive that the row is used with simple rigidity, and little of the licence which elsewhere in the composer's serial works encompasses the more improvisatory and empirical demands of his highly characteristic harmonic sense. This rigidity of technique perfectly corresponds to the plain fact of the carved epitaph, and is close to the universal poignancy of some Roman memorial inscriptions.

The Russian string quartet has a considerably longer history than the Russian symphony; Alyabiev wrote his first string quartet in 1815, to say nothing of the three quartets by a certain Taneev—possibly an ancestor of one or both of the two late-nineteenth-century Taneevs—published by Breitkopf at the end of the eighteenth century, of which the last traceable copies seem to have been destroyed in the Dresden holocaust of 1945. Yet the quartet has never achieved the importance in Russian music that it enjoys in other countries; numerically there are plenty of quartets but they are the stepchildren of Russian music. The Balakirev circle was in its early days actively hostile to chamber music, though Borodin eventually conquered his friends by his two fine compositions. Tchaikovsky's three are not as bad as seems to be commonly supposed but they can hardly be reckoned among his masterpieces, and the world would be little poorer if it were for ever deprived of the quartets of Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov. The only nineteenth-century Russians who took the quartet seriously enough to write a whole series of them were Glazunov and S.I. Taneev (whose unrelated or only distantly related namesake, A. S. Taneev, also produced three respectably written but very lightweight quartets), and their only twentieth-century successors have been Myaskovsky and Shostakovich.

• Two new Williamson works (Anthony Payne)

• Bennett's Mines of Sulphur (Stanley Sadie)