Since his death in 1970 Roberto Gerhard's posthumous reputation has suffered from precisely the kind of neglect that seems to follow the death of many a major artist. For those admirers in Britain and Spain expecting to have to wait for the centenary of his birth in 1996 for any kind of reassessment, 1992 provided an unexpected, and very welcome, interim bonus.

Gerhard composed Pandora in wartime Cambridge, England, between December 1942 and April 1943. It was commissioned for Europe's leading Modern Dance company, the Ballet Jooss, which had left Germany and its Essen base after Hitler's seizure of power, and had established itself, more or less precariously, in England. The score is dedicated ‘to Alice Isabella Roughton’, and uses the ensemble of two pianos with light percussion which Jooss had favoured since the earliest days in Germany and now found well suited to conditions of wartime austerity.

The Concerto for Orchestra has probably been the most performed of Roberto Gerhard's works since its triumphant première at the 1965 Cheltenham Festival. Yet it is one of the most difficult for the listener to come to terms with, owing in part to its apparent ‘athematicism’. Any thematic aspect seems at first totally subordinated to the surface play of extreme textural and colouristic invention.

Britten set Aschenbach's hymn to his enfranchised soul at the end of his composing life, but a conscious relationship between experience and an art that would record, analyse and confirm its integrity was present from the first and gives a revelatory quality to his voice-and-piano/small orchestra works. The first significant attempt to ‘keep account of the real’ occurs in the Hugo, Verlaine and de la Mare settings of 1928–1931, when home and life outside its sheltering bounds became for the first time polarized and opposed. In June 1928 Britten submitted an end-of-term essay on ‘Animals’ whose subversive tenor shattered his elders' golden opinions and so harshly unlearned his own illusion that the settings that follow stand to those that precede the event as sagesse stands to méconnaissance, consciousness to nescience.

• Carpenter's Britten Christopher Shaw

• Copland's Copland? Robin Holbway

• Recent Furtwängler Books Peter Palmer

• ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ Jane Highfield

• Schnittke and Kancheli Ronald Weitzman

• Medtner Martin Anderson

• Goldschmidt and Ullmann Calum MacDonald

• Goehr, Lloyd, Hamilton David Murray

• Howells and Simpson Guy Richards

• Xenakis James Harley

• Contemporary Americans Rodney Lister

• Waxman, Rosza, Herrman etc Bret Johnson

• New Swedish Music Guy Rickards

• Sallinen's ’Kullervo’ Andrew Kemp

• Finnish Trumpet Concerti Deborah Calland

• Music of Fire and Ice: an Icelandic Discography Guy Rickards

• Huddersfield Festival 1992 David Power

• Warsaw Autumn Festival 1992 John Warnaby

• Nicola Lefanu's ‘Blood Wedding’ Guy Rickards

• David Diamond's Eleventh Symphony Bret Johnson

• Osborne's ‘Homage à Panufnik’ Malcolm Miller