The decades immediately following World War II constituted a flourishing period of musical innovation on the international scene, encompassing a considerable range of stylistic orientations and techniques. Exploration that led to genuinely innovative compositional practices involving relationships among melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre reached fruition by the mid-1980s. Accordingly, the challenge to composers who emerged during this latter period was twofold: to develop personal styles through a discriminating selection from this large heritage of techniques and stylistic resources – and, in the process, to avoid imitating composers who had used them earlier. In countries not dominated by any particular compositional doctrine – most notably the United States, Great Britain and the Nordic countries – important composers emerged as consolidators who combined and synthesized these resources in a fresh and individual manner. One who has responded most successfully to this challenge is Finland's Magnus Lindberg.

This year sees the centenary (on 1 May) of the birth of the composer Jón Leifs. Had it fallen just a few years earlier the occasion would have attracted virtually no attention outside his native Iceland, but over the past four years a series of CD recordings, mainly from the Swedish label BIS, has done much to establish Leifs as a figure of far more than local significance. His output included three string quartets, piano music, songs, choral works (both accompanied and unaccompanied) a sizeable number of short orchestral works, an organ concerto, oratorios and the first ever symphony composed by an Icelander. The creative personality emerging with each new recording is among the most radical and original of the 20th century and this article is intended as a short introduction to the music of this remarkable composer.

With the death of Joonas Kokkonen in October of 1996, Finland lost one of its most important post-World War II composers. Almost certainly, Kokkonen is most widely known outside Finland for his 1975 opera Viimeiset kiusaukset (Tlie Last Temptations). Yet his orchestral compositions such as the Cello Concerto (1969), the song cycle Lintuijen Tuonela (The Hades of the Birds, 1958–59), the Requiem (1981), the chamberorchestra work …Durch einen Spiegel… 1977), or such chamber works as the Piano Quintet (1953) or the String Quartets Nos.l (1959) and 3 (1976) demonstrate that masterpieces may be found in virtually every genre of Kokkonen's output. (Oddly, piano music represents a small and minor position in Kokkonen's oeuvre – a surprising fact given his accomplishments as a pianist.)

Don't blame yourself if you don't recognize the name of the Norwegian composer Leif Solberg – when he turned up at the Christmas party of the Norwegian Composers' Union a couple of years ago, they didn't know who he was either. Solberg has been at best a marginal figure in Norwegian musical life, cut off from the Oslo committees which decide who gets heard. His isolation has been both stylistic – his traditionalist craft sitting ill with the modernism that ruled Nordic roosts until recently – and literal, since he has been content with the low-profile rewards of galvanising musical activity in Lillehammer, two hours' train ride north of Oslo.

When I referred to Heinz Holliger's ‘maximalist’ oeuvre in a recent review, I was unaware that his Swiss colleague Armin Schibler (1920–86) had used the term ‘Maximal Music’ to describe his own stylistic catholicity. On reflection, however, the epithet seems apposite to each of these two uncommonly searching composers. Like Michael Tippett, whom he admired, Schibler was sometimes accused of squandering his talents in a constant quest to enlarge his range. Holliger's music, too, has been deemed wanting in individual personality because of its apparent preoccupation with extended techniques. It is a music which may alienate as much as it attracts, and which could not be further removed from Heinz Holliger's public persona as a virtuosic oboist. There are fine performers whose compositions have proved to be disappointingly second-hand. But not only are Holliger's inimitable (for which his heroic interpreters must sometimes be thankful!); every bar that he writes is the product of an expressive need.

According to Weisgal's detailed account of the origins of The Eternal Road, Reinhardt had no inkling of his plans until their November 1933 meeting in Paris. Weisgal began by outlining the idea of a biblical drama that would for the first time evoke the Old Testament in all its breadth rather than in isolated episodes. At the end of his account, according to Weisgal, Reinhardt sat motionless and in silence before saying – very simply –

• Apollo's Expulsion from the Garden Geoffrey Alvarez

• Poems by Payne and Lloyd Mark Cromar

• Contemporary Swedish Guy Rickards

• Niels Viggo Bentzon Paul Rapoport

• Nino Rota Bret Johnson

• Barbican: The Carter Event Julian Silverman

• Stockholm: Anders Eliassons's Dante Oratorio Christoph Schlüren

• Barbican: John Adams's ‘Century Rolls’ Robert Stein

• South Bank: Tal's ‘The Garden’ Malcolm Miller

• Conway Hall: Ian Pace plays Christopher Fox James Erber

• Royal Albert Hall: 1998 Proms II Martin Anderson

• George Perle on the ‘Lyric Suite’ Catherine Dale

• Musical Nationalism in UK and Finland Peter Palmer

• Humphrey Searle on the Internet Lewis Foreman