In the 1920s there were plenty of new opportunities for young composers to meet colleagues of all ages in the many circles, societies and associations which were then in existence. The most interesting, though short-lived of them was the Leningrad Association of Contemporary Music (LASM), which declared itself to be ‘a gathering of everyone connected with music today’. The Association was planned as a local branch of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) and of the central Moscow association. But in fact the LASM acted quite independently. Its founders were people who were already well-placed and even high-ranking in the country's musical life: the musicologists and critics Boris Asafyev (Igor Glebov), Vyacheslav Karatigin, Alexander Ossovsky and Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, the composers Yuliya Weysberg, Alexander Zhitomirsky, Andrey Paschenko, Yuriy Tyulin, Maximilian Shteinberg, Lyubov Shtreikher-Bikhter and Vladimir Shcherbachev. Their first meeting took place on 15 April 1925 at the home of Rimsky-Korsakov and Weysberg.

Shostakovich harboured a special esteem for Chekhov's literary genius, and knew by heart many of the short stories. At the same time, the composer felt an extraordinary tangible identification with the Jewish spirit, as well as a recognition of the role and importance of the Jewish contribution in history. (When it comes to the references in the disputed biography, Testimony, to Shostakovich's fierce personal stance whenever he came across the slightest expression of anti-semitism, there is sufficient independent evidence to indicate that Solomon Volkov's reporting cannot seriously be challenged.)

A vast epic of the Jewish people in four Acts (or Parts), Der Weg der Verheissung is Kurt Weill's only collaboration with the poet, playwright, and novelist Franz Werfel (1890–1945). The text was written in Austria in the spring and summer of 1934, and the score was drafted during the second half of the same year – mostly in the village of Louveciennes outside Paris. The musical perspectives are exceptionally wide: on the one hand they afford a view of all Weill's major compositions from the Mahagonny opera (1927–29) to Tlie Seven Deadly Sins and the Second Symphony (1933); on the other, they look forward to his very last stage work for Broadway, the ‘Musical Tragedy’ Lost in the Stars (1949) which he and Maxwell Anderson based on Alan Paton's anti-apartheid novel, Cry, the Beloved Country.

37 years since his death, and the bourgeois music world still hasn't much more time for Hanns Eisler than he had for it! But things have moved on. The work of the one who, above all others, has come to be regarded as the very emblem of the revolutionary communist composer does fill a useful gap in the market. To that extent, there can be generosity in victory. Among its new trophies, Berlin Classics has come across and re-released a near-exhaustive collection of recordings of Eisler's music. Some of these, such as Ernst Busch's searing declamations, are documents of a lost age, more hairraisingly alive than anything happening today.

In the process of my research on the topic ‘The Soviet Avant-Garde from the 1970s to the present’, I learned that one of the heroes (actually, the heroine) of my studies, Sofia Gubaidulina, had been invited by San Jose State University School of Music for a festival of her music. The annual festivals in the SJSU, called ‘The Annual Guest Composers Series’, are each dedicated to the music of a specific contemporary composer. The guests of previous ‘Series’ were Morton Subotnik (1993) and Mario Davidowsky (1994); the festival in 1995 was devoted to Gubaidulina; George Crumb was selected for the following festival in 1996.

Among his friend in Moscow, Alfred Schnittke was affectionately known as Alf. In Russia this nickname sounded vaguely foreign, as if to highlight how exotic Schnittke's presence was in the dreary life of Soviet Moscow. There he could have easily passed for a Martian.

• ‘Shostakovich Reconsidered’ John Shand

• Underground Music from the Former USSR Peter Quinn

• George Benjamin Geoffrey Alvarez

• Arvö Pärt Ronald Weitzman

• David Bedford Mark Cromar

• Holloway, Cannon and Rawsthorne Peter Palmer

• ENO: Bryars's ‘Dr Ox's Experiment’ Robert Stein

• Odessa: Music for Emancipation Thea Derks

• South Bank: Detlev Glanert Guy Richards

• Con way Hall: Stevenson at 70 Laurence Hughes

• Trinity College: Goldschmidt Premières Malcolm Miller

• Wigmore Hall: John Pickard Guy Rickards

• BMIC: Graham Whettam 70th Birthday Malcolm Miller

• Proms Report: The First Weeks Martin Anderson

• Centre Acanthes: Russian Music Maria Metaxakis