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.)

Aaron Copland was an urban American Jew of Russian extraction born – as he memorably remarked –

on November 14 1900 on a street in Brooklyn that can only be described as drab. It had none of the garish colour of the ghetto, none of the charm of an old New England thoroughfare, or even a pioneer street. It fills me with mild wonder every time I realize that a musician was born on that street. Music was the last thing anyone would ever have connected with that street. In fact, no one ever had connected music with my family or that street. The idea was entirely original with me.

The first part of this article outlined Roy Harris's symphonic output up to Symphony No.6 of 1944, the period of his greatest popularity after the phenomenal success of the Third, still often referred to as the greatest American symphony. I now turn to the latter half of Harris's copious, symphonic output, works which – with the similarly meteoric decline in his critical standing after the early 1950s – have (with the exception Symphony No.7) been seldom heard and seldom accorded much critical consideration: a state of affairs which is certainly unjust.

BL: The Concerto dates from 1966. It was written for Gary Graffman. We had worked together two years previously on the Fourth Piano Sonata, which I wrote on a Ford Foundation Grant. In those days the foundation was very active in getting performers and composers together and commissioning works. So we decided to do a Concerto. By chance a letter arrived from Eric Leinsdorf, then Music Director of the Boston Symphony, on another matter and when I mentioned in my reply that I was doing a Concerto for Gary, Leinsdorf said he wanted to do the première.

• Howard Pollack's ‘Copland’ Michael Oliver

• New Birtwistle Studies Anthony Gritten

• Shostakovich Edward McKeon

• Four Minimalists Peter Quinn

• Zemlinsky Calum MacDonald

• London Coliseum ‘Nixon in China’ Robert Stein

• San Francisco to Orkney: Recent Maxwell Davies premières Paul Conway

• Royal Albert Hall Proms: Holloway's Symphony Annalise Plummer

• Royal Opera House: Prokofiev's ‘Semyon Kotko’ and ‘War and Peace’ Martin Anderson

• London University: ‘Thwarted Voices’ Lloyd Moore

• London, RAM: ‘Pärt in Profile’ Martin Anderson

• Maazel as Composer Martin Anderson

• Birtwistle's ‘Harrison's Clocks’ David Wright

• New Feldman discs Roger Sutherland

• Glass, Adams and Rorem Bret Johnson

• Roy Harris Symphonies Richard Tiedman

• George Crumb Peter Quinn

• Naxos ‘American Classics’ Bret Johnson

• A portrait of Vítezslava Kaprálová Calum MacDonald