Aulis Sallinen's symphonies are predictably always compared with those of his compatriot Sibelius. The Cincinnati SO's American première of his latest — the Eighth — in January, just nine months after its world première — Paavo Järvi conducted both performances — hardly made it easy for the listener to shake off such ancestral thoughts, as it was programmed alongside Sibelius's own Fifth. Whereas the Fifth is probably Sibelius's most joyous symphony, Sallinen's, despite initially envisaging an uplifting conclusion, eventually settles for the familiar darkness.

Among major European festivals, the Lucerne Festival is outstanding in the attention it pays to contemporary music. The latest manifestation of this is the founding of an annual Lucerne Festival Academy for young professional players, specializing in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, under the leadership of Ensemble Intercontemporain and the indefatigable Pierre Boulez. Nor is this is on the modest scale of a ‘young Sinfonietta’: its final concert, conducted by Boulez, began with Harrison Birtwistle's massive Earth Dances.

SILVESTROV: Silent Songs; Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam. Sergey Yakovenko (bar), Ilya Scheps, Valentin Silvestrov (pno). ECM New Series 982 1424.

KANCHELI: Diplipito; Valse Boston. Thomas Demenga (vc), Derek Lee Ragin (counter-ten), Dennis Russell Davies (pno), Stuttgarter Kammerorchester c. Dennis Russell Davies. ECM New Series 472 0822.

The last two of the works commissioned by the Boston Symphony to celebrate the first season of James Levine as its Music Director were unveiled by Levine and the orchestra in Symphony Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall in New York in April. John Harbison, whose The Great Gatsby was written for Levine and the Metropolitan Opera, had been working on an opera based on Lolita by Nabokov. He eventually decided that the problems presented by the staging of the work were insurmountable, and has, at least for the moment, abandoned the project, which he now considers misguided. He made the same decision in regard to the Fitzgerald novel about ten years before actually completing that project, so in the future this opera may also eventually see the light of day. Meanwhile, just as Harbison's aborted first attempt at Gatsby produced his ‘fox-trot for orchestra’, Remembering Gatsby, the work at Lolita has resulted in his most recent work for the BSO, a seven-minute overture based on material intended for the opera, entitled Darkbloom. Harbison's program note for the work does not name either Lolita or Nabokov, but speaks only of ‘a famous and infamous American novel’ in which Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov) ‘is a just a secondary character’. Harbison chose Darkbloom as a title for the work ‘because it effectively conjures up the mood of this overture’, and ‘serves as an emblem or anagram for the complex tragic-comic spirit of the story and its author’. Darkbloom itself is attractive and skilfully wrought. A balletic section which portrays two young women playing tennis is the most memorable music in the work.

The Balkans' Summer Music Camp was first established in 1995. Nigel Osborne's initiative was to address the needs of children who had been victims of trauma caught in conflict and warlocked zones in the former Yugoslavia. Through a professional exchange with Nigel Osborne last year at the Cambridge Music Conference, my sister Catherine Carmack (12.10.57–12.12.03) decided to work as a volunteer at the camp this summer. Owing to her untimely death I went in her place, to observe the creative and curative process of the children's development. About 35 children from the Special School of Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina came to the Adriatic for a week's vacation on the coast of Croatia. Most of these children live in an orphanage in Mostar, but are receiving music therapy through the Pavarotti Music Centre. Although most of the children were attended by carers, a few of the children were accompanied by their mothers. Many of the children are primarily suffering from exposure to violence and remain traumatized. Some of them have special needs including Down's Syndrome; two were marginally disabled with cerebral palsy.

One of the consequences of the extreme paucity of new music broadcasting in Britain is that it is extraordinarily hard to keep up with the output of the major creative talents working in continental Europe. If we leave aside the already-canonical elder figures, only a handful of composers get anything like reasonable coverage (depending on one's definition of ‘reasonable’ — can one new work in four or five really be considered sufficient?). Others seem to have dropped out of listening range altogether. Such is the case with the Romanian-French composer Horatiu Radulescu, now 63 and by any standards one of the most fascinating and individual creative figures of his generation, whose music has been shamefully neglected by the BBC for more years than anyone would care to mention. Besides the usual sorts of prefabricated excuses why this is so (so many composers, so little available broadcast time), one speculates about further reasons. Is Radulescu's music considered simply too weird, too extreme, for Radio 3 listeners? Yes, his pieces are sometimes quite long; yes, they sometimes have strange titles (Capricorn's Nostalgic Crickets; Dizzy Divinity, I; Dr Kai Hong's Diamond Mountain); yes, they are sometimes not easy to digest at one listening. But isn't exposure to the cutting edge of the performing arts one of the things we should reasonably expect from our broadcasting media, especially in the case of a radical artist of such distinction and achievement?

Good angel, bad angel is a new 1-act opera, premièred in Edinburgh on 20 May and toured to Glasgow, Peebles and Inverness on 21, 23 and 25 May; it received four performances in all. It lasts almost exactly an hour, and is scored for the slenderest forces imaginable – three singers covering six roles, and an orchestra of four players (bass clarinet doubling B flat clarinet, violin, viola, cello). The story is nasty, centring on the pointless murder of a miserly old shopkeeper on Christmas Day; it slightly reminds one of A Christmas Carol, except that it completely lacks Dickens's optimism and hope. The opera supposedly ends with the central character's redemption, but this is ambiguous and pretty hard to follow.

THE MILKEN ARCHIVE OF AMERICAN JEWISH MUSIC. Naxos American Classics 8.559400 through 8.559425 and upwards.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra celebrated the birthday of Hans Christian Andersen, 200 years to the day, with a world première by Per Norgård. His 50-minute ‘fairytale cantata’, entitled Will- O'-the-Wisps Go to Town, was inspired by one of the great Danish author's last stories.

Graham Williams (Welsh-born, in 1940, but long since London-based) is almost as well known as a facilitator of music as a composer in his own right — a pity, because he has things to say which are worth listening to. My first, belated, encounter with his music came in the form of an Elegy for string octet, premièred by the Artea and Pavão Quartets in the Purcell Room in May 2003, a sober and dignified essay in controlled passion, stylistically somewhere between Alban Berg and the Strauss of Metamorphosen. It was the Artea Quartet which was responsible for my next encounter with Williams' music: they gave the première of his Fourth String Quartet in the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London, on 21 September 2004 — the three-minute, fourth-movement scherzo trailed four days beforehand in a live performance on In Tune on BBC Radio 3.

The fortnight-long celebration Omaggio to the late Luciano Berio, held 15–30 April 2004, explored the post-modern passion and exuberance of the composer's musical personality, from the experimental daring and fun of the era of new music of the 1960s to the more searching multi-cultural tapestries of the final decades and his last works. Large audiences drawn from all ages enjoyed a wide range of Berio's works at the South Bank Centre and the Royal Academy of Music, including several UK premières including Stanze, his last work, as well as seminal pieces such as Sinfonia, Laborintus II, the fourteen Sequenzas, and electronic music, performed by leading virtuosi and ensembles. Overall, the festival represented a significant and memorable tribute to one of the leading figures of new music in the second half of the 20th century.

FOULDS: Three Mantras op. 61b3; Lyra Celtica, Concerto for voice and orchestra op. 501; Apotheosis (Elegy) for violin and orchestra op. 182; Mirage op. 20. 1Susan Bickley (mezzo), 2Daniel Hope (vln), 3City of Birmingham Youth Chorus, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra c. Sakari Oramo. Warner Classics 2564 61525-2.

The difference that James Levine — finally installed and in control as Music Director — made almost instantly in the Boston Symphony is, to say the least, striking. The orchestra obviously loves working with him, and their contentment even spills over into the concerts when someone other than Levine is conducting; their playing these days is always uniformly wonderful, characterized not just by a concern for accuracy of detail and beauty of sound but also by a palpable pleasure in listening to each other and making music together. As well as changing the general atmosphere, Levine has altered the orientation of the BSO's programming drastically: the amount of 20th- and 21st-century music is greatly increased, but co-ordinated with older standard repertory works in interesting and appealing ways. Not only has the increased amount of newer music not hurt attendance, it seems to have increased interest — certainly among younger people and musicians, who are finding that there are things going on at Symphony Hall that they want to hear.

Guy Dagul, already established as one of the UK's most sought-after composers of music for TV and Film, with successes in Hollywood, Channel Four (The Investigators), BBC (notably his score for the docu-soap Paddington Green, screened June 1999) and Carlton's Return to the Wild, has now composed his first serious concert piece.2 This is a Grand Fantasia for piano duet and strings, dedicated to his parents, the world-renowned Piano Duo of Harvey Dagul and Isabel Beyer. It was given its world premiere by them on the occasion of their Golden Wedding Anniversary Concert on 30 January in St Saviour's Church, St Albans before a packed audience.

The Presteigne Festival in the 21st century is in many ways the natural successor to the post-war years of the Cheltenham Festival, not just in its enlightened choice of first-rate contemporary British music, but in its cultivation of ‘house composers’ who can be spotted browsing in local shops as well as providing the focus of several informal pre-concert talks. In fact, the music of three composers who received their first big commissions from the Cheltenham Festival – William Mathias, Alun Hoddinott and John McCabe – were all celebrated at the 2004 Presteigne Festival.

IVOR GURNEY: Despair; Sehnsucht; Song of the Summer Woods; The Sea; Nocturnes in B and A flat; Preludes Nos.1–9. HOWARD FERGUSON: Piano Sonata in F minor; Five Bagatelles. Mark Bebbington (pno). Somm New Horizons SOMMCD 038.

Like its predecessors Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, the third opera in John Adams's trilogy, Doctor Atomic, seems set fair to juxtapose modern political forces, personalities and moral debate. Here admiration for Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow geniuses who created the atomic bomb is contrasted with the enormity of destruction wreaked on Hiroshima. With over a year to go to the opera's world première by San Francisco Opera, the composer himself conducted Easter Eve 1945, the opening of Act 2, at the Albert Hall on 22 August with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Audra McDonald as soloist.

Paul Wittgenstein's commissioning of concertos for piano left-hand is as enviable a legacy as any performer could wish to have, centred as it is on concertos by Korngold, Franz Schmidt (who also penned for Wittgenstein a set of Concertante Variations on a theme of Beethoven with orchestra and three piano quintets), Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Britten (his op. 21 Diversions) and Ravel. Yet the maimed pianist's quixotic attitude to the works he received is almost as remarkable. Ravel he offended by the liberties he took with the solo part, while Prokofiev's Concerto No. 4 languished unplayed for a quarter of a century, until three years after the composer's death. Yet these cases pale into insignificance compared to the treatment meted out to the concerto that Paul Hindemith wrote for Wittgensein in 1923.

I have had occasion to be sniffy about Lorin Maazel's music in these pages before (Tempo No. 218), not least because of its sheer lack of profile, of any hint of individuality. So it was with exceedingly modest expectations that I took my seat for his first opera, 1984, the world-première run of which began on 3 May. Even so, I was disappointed: no ditchwater is as dull. The basic problem is the absence of any discernible personality in what Maazel writes: the musical language of1984 is a thin gruel boiled up from left-over Prokofiev, Copland, Bartók, Ravel, Janáček, whatever was lying around the mid-20th-century chopping-board of Maazel's memory as he put the piece together. Add a secondary deficit: there's absolutely no sense of dramatic tension – the work unfolds at the same plodding pace throughout. Now sprinkle with the kind of mistakes you might expect from a rookie operatic composer. The opening ‘Hate’ chorus, for example, revealed instantly what was going to be a recurrent difficulty: the scoring and an over-ambitious tempo combine to make the sung text difficult to understand. Maazel repeatedly doubles vocal lines in the orchestra, sacrificing their clarity.

SORABJI: Two Piano Pieces; Fantaisie espagnole; Valse-Fantaisie: Hommage à Johann Strauss; Three Pastiches; Le jardin parfumé; Nocturne Jami; Gulistan; Introito and Preludio corale from Opus clavicembalisticum; Prelude, Interlude, and Fugue; Fragment for Harold Rutland; Fantasiettina sul nome illustre dell'egregio poeta Christopher Grieve ossia Hugh M'Diarmid; Quære reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora; St. Bertrand de Comminges: ‘He was Laughing in the Tower’. HABERMANN: À la manière de Sorabji: ‘Au clair de la lune’. Michael Habermann (pno). BMS 427CD–429CD (3-CD set).

SORABJI: Piano Sonata No. 4. Jonathan Powell (pno). Altarus AIR-CD-9069(1)–9069(3) (3-CD set priced as 2).