In a review of the Cello Sonata in these pages, I suggested that Britten had paid Rostropovich a musician's compliment in writing a cello part which assumed technical mastery yet provided little occasion for its ostentatious demonstration. Such a compliment aptly summarizes the basis on which so fruitful a chamber-music partnership as theirs must exist, but to repeat it before the wider and less intimate audience of the orchestral concert is to run the risk of being misunderstood. It may be for this reason that the composer has chosen not to give his new work, for Rostropovich's cello and orchestra, the customary title ‘concerto’; but at least as many initial misunderstandings are likely to arise from his decision, wholly justifiable though it is, to call it a ‘symphony’.

Composers' revisions really fall into two main groups (though each group itself can be sub-divided many times over). The first group I should name ‘practical’, i.e., revisions or after-thoughts which are designed to make a work more viable; we constantly meet this kind of revising in the opera house, but I should also include under this heading those cases where a composer has written, say, a complete new movement to replace an existing one. More often than not, this is the revision of an early work; his intention is ‘practical’—to get rid of the one, perhaps feeble, movement that goes against the chances of the work's success and thus save what is worth preserving in the rest of the work. This is what we might call good husbandry on the part of the composer. He keeps his crops, so to speak, in the best and most marketable condition.

Much has been made of the importance of the tritone in the War Requiem. Not only does this interval colour many of the harmonies and melodic contours of the work, it is also an important agent in maintaining its characteristic tonal instability. Interestingly the composer's first large-scale masterpiece for voices and orchestra, Peter Grimes, is if anything even more dependent on tritone relationships, although unlike the Requiem it has few passages which are not either firmly in a key or else moving purposefully towards one. It could be said that whereas this interval provokes uncertainty in the later work, in Grimes it embodies incompatibility, for the opera's dramatic movement is generated by tonal progressions which swing back and forth between two great poles of A and E flat, keys at opposite ends of the tonal spectrum, to symbolise the impossibility of coexistence for Grimes and the Borough.

This is not, I fear, the much-needed full critical assessment of Frank Bridge. The very size of his output makes such a task difficult, and it is not helped by the disappearance of several important scores, among them the Cello Concerto (1930) and Enter Spring (1927)—which Britten remembers “as a riot of melodic and harmonic richness, although it is thirty years since I heard it or saw the score.” Performances of his music, at any rate in public, are exceedingly rare, and no-one except Britten has shown any interest in correcting the fact. Fortunately it is possible to outline a rough sketch of Bridge—incomplete and undetailed, but fair so far as it goes—by concentrating on the chamber music, where he is at his most personal; and thus to suggest some of the reasons why, personal affection apart, Britten today cherishes Bridge's memory so warmly.

In my experience, anniversary articles about living composers, read a few decades after the event, seem terribly stale and drab—the righter, the staler. The reason is clear. Articles which time proves wrong have, at least, a period flavour: how delightful to see how ‘great’ Spohr or Spontini used to be. (There are also those, of course, which time proves wrongly wrong, at any rate for a time: the period flavour of Mendelssohn's greatness is gradually evaporating, his timeless greatness re-emerging). But to see how right Rochlitz was about Beethoven, or how right—about 40 years too late—I was about Schoenberg, is shatteringly tedious: we don't dive into the past in order to watch how, sweat dripping from its self–righteous forehead, it laboriously discovers the obvious. The prophet's tragedy is that by the time he's right he's out of date with the noise he makes. There will never be any professional prophets, as opposed to those enthusiastic amateurs, good luck to them. It is an unrewarding occupation, a pastime in the most profoundly literal sense of the word.

The ‘Night Piece’ for solo piano was composed in the spring of 1963 in response to a request from the Committee of the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition for a work to be compulsory for all participants. The Committee, of course, regarded it a high honour that the country's leading composer should so generously accede to a request for such a piece of occasional music. In addition to adding to the prestige of the competition the piece was also invaluable in revealing the competitors' imaginative and interpretative powers as they had had no opportunity of hearing any previous performance or recording.

We know from the composer's own account that work on A Midsummer Night's Dream was by no means always easy going. Therefore when I accidentally stumbled (aurally, be it noted) upon the remarkable fact that the four chords used in Act II of the Dream were almost identical with those used in the setting of Keats's ‘Sonnet to Sleep’ in the Serenade I fully expected to learn that the composer had consciously borrowed from the earlier work, reversing the order of the first two chords (adding a B to the D major chord) and magically re-spacing and re-scoring them. As the poetic element in each piece is concerned with the properties of sleep (inducing a healing forgetfulness on the one hand, a fantastic change of identities on the other) the conscious re-working of those earlier chords of the Serenade would have seemed by no means inapt.

For good or ill, the day is past when the parental injunction that ‘children should be seen but not heard’ was heeded, if indeed it ever was. Our only concern is whether the sound they make shall be euphonic or cacophonic.