By all (press) accounts, the overture to The Tempest, Thomas Adès's first full-scale opera, was completed at speed – just five days before the 20 February première, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Comparisons with Rossini naturally followed, but the question remained whether such facility would be married to the necessary substance for a setting of Shakespeare's play Robin Holloway's claim (in the Financial Times) that the opera was ‘make or break’ for Adès may in hindsight come to appear somewhat overstated, but there is no doubt that this was an important milestone in the composer's career.

Not being a string player himself, Mark-Anthony Turnage approached his first concerto for a string instrument with some trepidation. It turns out that while the writing for the viola is idiomatic enough, Turnage has something of a love/hate relationship with traditional ideas about the concerto. Divided into two movements – Turnage admitted that in the unlikely event of his writing a symphony it would have three, five or six movements, never four – the new concerto (completed in 2001 and here given its UK première) has the expected cadenza but one that appears only 36 bars in! Such challenging attitudes to an old form characterize the new piece, subtitled On Opened Ground. Even so the work's structure – scherzando opening with slower coda, slow second movement and brisk chaconne finale – bring us back to the more usual reference points for a concerto. While he acknowledges the surprising influence of Walton ‘in the second movement’, the influence of that composer's own viola concerto is actually more pervasive than Turnage would have us believe. Even the title, while apparently making reference to Seamus Heaney's collection Opened Ground, seems to point more fruitfully to the ground bass of the second movement's chaconne. One thing is certainly as described: On Opened Ground is, as he claims, one of Turnage's most lyrical pieces and might win him an audience for whom the earlier astrigencies were too great.

It's been more than 40 years since Elliott Carter wrote a concertante work for piano and orchestra: the 1963 Piano Concerto was one of the high watermarks of the complexity and richness of his early maturity. His latest piece is Dialogues for piano and large ensemble, and at its dazzlingly expressive world premiere performance on 23 January, by its commissioners and dedicatees, pianist Nicolas Hodges and the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Oliver Knussen, the work was revealed as one of the most significant of Carter's recent catalogue.

Next season James Levine ceases to be Music Director Designate of the Boston Symphony, and becomes the orchestra's Music Director and Conductor. Due to previous commitments, Levine has conducted only one program in each of the three seasons since he was named to the post. Celebration of his ascendency to the directorship of the orchestra has already begun, though, with the commissioning of works from a number of composers, including Milton Babbitt, John Harbison, and Yehudi Wyner, for his first season, restoring one of the proudest traditions of the BSO – that of the music director's active and enthusiastic promotion of contemporary orchestral compositions. It is not insignificant that this first season of the directorship of this American orchestra by an American conductor features American composers at a time when classical concert music seems to be about the only area of American life resistant to overt jingoism. Levine's earliest plans for the season included performing Elliott Carter's Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei, and, hoping to link the occasion and the BSO to the triptych, he commissioned from Carter a short introductory fantasy to that work, entitled Micomicón. This pendant received its première, preceding a performance of Partita, the first part of the Symphonia triptych, at Symphony Hall in January.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's conductor, Sakari Oramo, took up the cause of the long-neglected and little-regarded British composer John Foulds (1880–1939) in the late 1990s, as soon as he was appointed to his present post. This February saw his most high-profile push on Foulds's behalf so far, with performances of three Foulds works – one of them a UK and concert première, another a world première – in three Symphony Hall concerts, two of them broadcast on BBC Radio 3. This was followed by a CD recording for Warner Classics of these three pieces plus a fourth, Foulds's early elegy for violin and orchestra, Apotheosis. Intervening in one of the pre-concert talks, Oramo stated his conviction that after decades of misunderstanding during his lifetime, and half a century of neglect thereafter, ‘we owe it to this remarkable composer to play his music – and play it often’. It is difficult to think that any London orchestra would dare to programme anything so distant from their narrow core repertoire and so utterly contrary to contemporary fashions. Yet three near-capacity audiences were plainly both surprised and enthralled by the music, and many members of the public expressed a desire to hear more.

What better event to proclaim the potential of Los Angeles's new Walt Disney Concert Hall than a bicentennial celebration of the birth of Berlioz with Simon McBurney's Theatre de Complicité of London and Esa-Pekka Salonen's Los Angeles Philharmonic?

An opera which runs for less than an hour and has 20 solo parts might seem destined to remain unperformed, but Scottish composer David Johnson's Sorry, False Alarm was composed as a training opera for students, and a workshop production by singers from Trinity College of Music (24 March, Greenwich) demonstrated that it fits its purpose admirably.

Stephen Dodgson (born in London, 1924) is not so much a neglected composer as a quintessentially English one, with a quizzical sense of humour, who has never really courted a mass audience. He is often described as ‘a performer's composer’, responding to commissions from colleagues and prominent artists connected with the Royal College of Music, where he taught harmony to, among others, guitarist John Williams back in the 1950s. His connexion also with Julian Bream led to his lifelong love-affair with the guitar, despite the fact that Dodgson never played the instrument himself. His resulting two Guitar Concertos (1959 and 1972) gained instant international recognition. At Dodgson's 80th Birthday celebration concert at the Royal Academy of Music on 29 February, Head of Guitar Studies Michael Lewin said in his introduction that: ‘no single composer who is a non-guitarist has contributed in such a major way to the guitar repertoire, and in such varied genres’.

My admiration for Michael Graubart's probing review of Hans Keller's Music and Psychology (Tempo Volume 58, No.227) is, I have to say, a little qualified by some of his censures over my editing. However, I agree that there are real issues at stake, and that some of these go beyond his own demonstrable errors: HK's piece on capital punishment on p. 31, for instance, is not appended ‘without explanation’, for the provenance is explained barely an inch above the text; the translators (Irene Auerbach and myself) are not ‘not named’, but are acknowledged on p. xix; and the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) will tell him that a ‘congress’ is not just ‘a meeting’ (the Congress of Vienna), but also a place of assembly (the US Congress) and a political movement (Trades Union Congress): from this last point of view ‘Zionist Congress’ is far from ‘misleading’.

In replying to Julian Silverman's reply to me, entitled ‘Did Anybody have to be Schoenberg?’, in the letters pages of Tempo Volume 58, no.227, I should like to take the opportunity to respond first to Christopher Wintle's letter above.