It is not widely known that the original version of Bartók's Sonata for solo violin differs in a number of details from the published edition, and in the finale significantly so. A complete list of the changes, which include many details such as bowings, fingerings, expression marks and caesuras, cannot be given here, nor would it serve any very valuable purpose, since the editing of the work for performance and publication by Menuhin, who had commissioned it, was done in close consultation with the composer. Some of the alternatives were indeed suggested by Bartók from the beginning, and were already jotted down on a spare half-page at the end of the manuscript when it was first sent to Menuhin. This is true, for instance, of the changes in the finale, although unlike most of the others, these, while arising out of considerations of practicability, are of very much more than mere practical importance. For the original text of the finale provides the most conspicuous example in all Bartók's works of the use of microtones.

The fusion of the textural complexity of ‘Scenes and Arias’ with the simpler procedures of ‘Chamber Music’ which marked Nicholas Maw's opera One Man Show also forms the basis of the language for his most recent work, the String Quartet, which was commissioned for this year's Harlow Festival. If, as in the opera, there is nothing so elaborate texturally as parts of ‘Scenes and Arias’, the formal processes are quite the most subtle and involved in any of the composer's work to date. This is not to say that any obscurity exists, indeed it is possibly the work's greatest achievement that for more than 35 minutes of continuous music the listener always knows where he is in a form which shows so many thematic relations and cross-references. As an adjunct to these methods there are sections and paragraphs which simultaneously perform different functions, and the whole forms a pattern of suggestions ansd statements which is of the utmost intricacy. Similar methods are sometimes to be seen in Sibelius, and this is emphasised by the melodic growth which often governs Maw's thematic connections, but the sheer scale of operations in the quartet makes it something new in this field. Alan Bush's Dialectic, for instance, which argues with similar rigour, occupies only half the time. Furthermore, the Bush and the Sibelius achieve their diversity through virtual monothematicism. Maw needs more material to fill his larger canvas, and this raises the additional problem of relating the different streams of thought thus engendered. The consequent interlocking of sections, together with the necessary anticipations and back references, could only have been achieved with considerable intellectual effort, yet the result is the most natural and musically felt structure Maw has so far conceived.

In 1962 the Municipality of the City of Buenos Aires commissioned Alberto Ginastera to compose an opera for the Colon Theatre, to have its first performance during the season of 1964. For some time before that Ginastera had been discussing with the Spanish poet and playwright, Alejandro Casona (who at that time was living in Argentina) the idea of writing an opera whose central figure would be Don Rodrigo, the last Visigoth King of Spain. This very beautiful legend has been related in hundreds of sagas throughout the centuries (in English literature Scott, among others, recreated it in ‘The Vision of Don Roderick’), and it has also been used operatically before, in Handel's Rodrigo. Ginastera's Don Rodrigo, his first opera, calls for a monumental mise-en-scène. It has four main characters: a dramatic soprano (Florinda, daughter of Count Don Julián); a dramatic tenor, (Don Rodrigo, King of Spain); a baritone (Don Julián, the governor of Ceuta); and a bass (Teudiselo, Rodrigo's tutor).

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