‘It is Held, Upon all Hands’, wrote Lionel Johnson, ‘that to write about the works of a living writer is a difficult and delicate thing’. How much more difficult and delicate then to write of a composer who is very much living, and working, but no longer composing. As Howard Ferguson's decision to stop composing after 1959 would suggest, his music is the product of the fiercest self-criticism applied as much to the craft of composition as to the meaning. It is music of high purpose and devoted attention to the problem in hand.

It may at first sight seem rather odd that Britten could feel justified in making this famous comment soon after composing the War Requiem (1961), which by dint of the interaction of three planes of experience alone might be construed as one of the most elaborate choral-orchestral compositions of the 20th century. Yet there is not really much of a contradiction here: the emotional highpoint of the work comes in a moment of great stillness in which an unaccompanied solo voice delivers a very simple line of text set to a very simple melodic contour and rhythm:

There is little doubt that the character of Peter Maxwell Davies's music has undergone a considerable change since he settled in the Orkneys. This can be explained in terms of the development of a mature compositional idiom allied to a virtuoso technique; but in his recent works, the composer has evinced a growing preoccupation with traditional forms. Elements of conventional sonata design can be traced through much of his recent music and there has been a tendency to revert to three– or four–movement structures in preference to his earlier more kaleidoscopic approach involving a series of shorter, interlinked sections. The music has therefore become more ‘symphonic’, and the trend extends beyond the symphonies themselves, Black Pentecost, or the recent Sinfonia Concertante and Sinfonietta Accademica.

During the last half decade two composers—Jonathan Lloyd and Jacob Druckman—were commissioned by major ensembles to write concertos for viola and orchestra. Each composer has interpreted the concerto form in his own way, but both have departed somewhat from the traditional concept of the concerto. (According to the Harvard Dictionary definition, the solo part of a concerto is written in a ‘highly virtuosic style’. Grove's Dictionary adds: ‘the name concerto [is] generally given to an instrumental composition designed to show the skill of an executant’.)