On David's last point, I am working on it. If I succeed, I'm not going to tell you all how. If I find I can't manage it, I'll go for adoption instead. Beneath the PRS I've always felt like a stray dog – or a member of an endangered species. But the officers of the society do well by their pets. I know: they send me their magazine, and there they all are, grinning expensively from their shiny pages. My own earnings from the PRS all these years, amount to 29p (no exaggeration). So I'd be well motivated to fetch papers for them, or whatever you have to do.

Few contemporary operas achieve the newsworthiness of Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice. Even before its 7 December première at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the piece dented public consciousness thanks to a barrage of press coverage surrounding the production, the cast, and the subject matter. The irony is that it was the other names associated with the opera – conductor Simon Rattle, director Trevor Nunn, and William Styron, author of the 1979 novel – that made Sophie's Choice a news story, rather than the fame of its composer. Yet Maw's was the ultimate responsibility for the creation of this ambitious, large-scale work.

Any Bostonian who cared about newer music, particularly newer American music, had long been resigned to the unhappy knowledge that nothing of any particular interest was ever likely to be going on at Symphony Hall. It was a shock, therefore, when it became apparent this fall that there were quite a few things happening in the current season of the Boston Symphony which one would very much want to hear. This new and happy state of things can almost certainly be directly attributed to the Music Director Designate, James Levine. Levine's commitment to newer American music was made manifest by the one program that he conducted this season, which included, along with the Brahms First Symphony, Roger Sessions's Piano Concerto and John Harbison's Third Symphony. Works have been commissioned to celebrate Levine's first season as Music Director, 2004–2005, from Milton Babbitt, Yehudi Wyner, and Harbison, among others. This re-connexion of the orchestra to one of the proudest features of its history under Serge Koussevitzky is cause for celebration. This spring's concerts by the Boston Symphony have included two new works of more than passing interest.

I first bought a subscription to Tempo because I thought I ‘ought’ to do better at keeping up with contemporary music; but I continue to subscribe because I find it the most interesting reading on music I know. Informative, even inspiring, and my collection of CDs has grown in ways I never expected.

The centenary year of one of the giants of 20th-century music has been and gone. It was all but ignored, so far as the UK is concerned, by his publishers, the musical establishment, the BBC etc. There had been vague plans to mount a number of relatively large-scale performances and broadcasts, to stage his two short operas for the first time and so on. They vanished. Music is a business like any other. Under the auspices of the Stefan Wolpe Society (USA), his daughter, the pianist Katharina Wolpe, managed to put together a short series of concerts in London recently, in which a few of his works received staggering performances before a very few people. The last of these, which would have seen the first performance for 2–3 decades of Wolpe's enormous Enactments for 3 pianos – had to be abandoned at the last minute for sudden lack of funds!

Poul Ruders's opera The Handmaid's Tale is hardly an unknown quantity: its world-première production in Copenhagen in 2000 was recorded by da capo (8.224165–66) in a three-CD set that received justly loud encomia. But the UK stage première, transferring the Danish production for a run at the English National Opera that began on 3 April, revealed – in a way that the recording obviously could not – what a superior piece of theatre it is: music, libretto, direction, stage design, costumes and lighting all coalesce to thrilling effect. A depressing number of operatic productions sacrifice musical integrity to directorial whim, so it's deeply heartening to report that, for once, everything pulled dedicatedly in the same direction, with outstanding results: it has been years since I've seen something this good.

Kaija Saariaho's opera L'amour de loin – her first – was completed in 2000 and given its first production at the Salzburg Festival that year; it toured to Paris in late 2001 and to Santa Fe in 2002; it has also been staged in Darmstadt. Its concert presentation at the Barbican on 21 November was thus the first performance without the support of stage business – and, not having seen those earlier productions, one wonders how it can have been staged at all: the work is a drama-less, interiorized dreamscape-cum-ritual which proceeds in the imaginations of its symbolic characters. Those are the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, Prince de Blaye (baritone – on this occasion Gerald Finley), whose idealized love Clémence, Princess of Tripoli (soprano – Dawn Upshaw) lives at a (literally) respectable distance, at the other end of the Mediterranean; the go-between is a pilgrim (mezzo soprano – Beth Clayton); male and female choruses, deployed separately and only intermittently, represent the outside world, their matter-of-factness contrasting with the high-flown unrealism of the principals.

Once again I have the pleasure of thanking various individuals for their welcome correspondence – specifically, Andrew Porter for a gracious acknowledgement (Tempo 221); Mark R. Taylor for some kind remarks and an intriguing observation (Tempo 222), and Michael Graubart for his extended and musicianly reflections (Tempo 221 and 222).

MESSIAEN: La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ1; Réveil des Oiseaux2. SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, EuropaChorAkademie c. 1Sylvain Cambreling, 2Hans Rosbaud; 2Yvonne Loriod (pno). Hänssler Classic 93.078 (2-CD set).

La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France c. Myung-Whun Chung. DG 471 569-2 (2-CD set).

Des Canyons aux Étoiles …. Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France c. Myung-Whun Chung, with Roger Muraro (pno), Jean-Jacques Justafré (hn). DG 471 617-2 (2-CD set).

Saint François d'Assise. Orchestre et Choeurs de l'Opéra de Paris c. Seiji Ozawa; José Van Dam (bar), Christiane Eda-Pierre (sop). Assai 222212 (4-CD set).

Saint François d'Assise. Halle Orchestra, Arnold Schoenberg Chor c. Kent Nagano; José Van Dam (bar), Dawn Upshaw (sop). DG 445 176-2 (2-CD set).

This year's BBC weekend at the Barbican dedicated to a single composer was given over to Mark-Anthony Turnage. Even Turnage himself expressed doubts initially about whether his music was diverse enough to withstand such exposure. His worries were unfounded, as the chance to explore his recent output, in particular, revealed a composer who is constantly growing in stature and breaking out in new and fruitful directions.

Michael Berkeley's choral and operatic successes have tended to obscure his accomplishments in the field of chamber music, which include a serialist String Trio (1978), two String Quartets and a Clarinet Quintet from the 1980s and the string quartet Torque and Velocity (1997). His latest essay in the genre, Abstract Mirror, for string quintet, was premièred on 11 February 2003 at Bishopsgate Hall by the Chilingirian Quartet, with cellist Stephen Orton. The work was a joint commission by the players and the City Music Society.

The composer himself relates how Heinrich Schiff had requested a ‘self-drive concerto’, one that combined the roles of soloist and conductor and in which a ‘sense of propulsion was provided by the orchestra's inner voice’. It has taken twelve years since the work's inception for John Casken's Cello Concerto to reach Munich, the southernmost major city in Germany. And it was Casken who conducted recently the Münchener Kammerorchester with the renowned Austrian soloist in the Herkulessaal here in the Bavarian capital. The world première was actually back in 1991 at the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival, with Schiff (to whom the work is dedicated) and the Northern Sinfonia delivering it with ‘exemplary and total allegiance’, according to one of Germany's more prestigious journals, Die Zeit. The work is ‘approachable’, this particular review continues; is cast in a musical language that ‘admits in its gestural directness highly expressive motifs and clear contours of tension’; manifests ‘expressive colour’; and gently queries the ‘depth of communication between soloist and orchestra’.

DUTILLEUX: Métaboles1; Cello Concerto2; The Shadows of Time3. 1Orchestra National de France c. Mstislav Rostropovitch; 2Arto Noras (vlc), Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra c. Jukka-Pekka Saraste; 3Boston Symphony Orchestra c. Seiji Ozawa. Hlatus 0927-49830-2.

There is something of the poisoned chalice about setting the Belgian poet Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, Rondels Bergamasques – if nothing more than by association to the all-too-famous Schoenberg Sprechgesang melodrama. As interpreters of Giraud's work (and often as compositional interlopers), we are conditioned to assume that we ought not to bathe in the same water as Schoenberg. And yet the Yorkshire-based composer Roger Marsh has succeeded in (re)making Pierrot as a living resource with a tremendous staged production of Giraud's complete and enigmatic torrent of fantasy.

ELLIOTT CARTER: Steep Steps1; Two Diversions2; Oboe Quartet3; Figment No.24; Au Quai5; Of Challenge and of Love6; Figment No.17; Retrouvailles8; Hiyoku9. 1Virgil Blackwell, 2,8Charles Rosen, 3Stephen Taylor, 3Curtis Macomber, 3,5Maureen Gallagher, 3Eric Bartlett, 4,7Fred Sherry, 5Peter Kolkay 6Tony Arnold, 6Jacob Greenberg, 9Charles Neidich, 9Ayako Oshima. Bridge 9128

CARTER: Oboe Quartet1; Four Lauds2; A 6 Letter Letter3; Figments Nos.1–24. ISANG YUN: Piri5; Oboe Quartet6. 1,3,5,6Heinz Holliger, 1,2,6Thomas Zehetmair, 1,6Ruth Killius, 1,4,6Thomas Demenga. ECM New Series 1848/49

The world première of Dominic Muldowney's Second Piano Concerto on 7 November came as part of a concert marking the 80th birthday of the BBC. The work was fashioned for Angela Hewitt, who was accompanied by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin. Hewitt's core repertoire of Bach, Ravel and Messiaen was reflected in the style of Muldowney's new piece, which married Classical with neo-Classical idioms yet at the same time sounded thoroughly post-modern in its cheerful eclecticism, witty sidesteps and theatrical leaps of imagination.