At a time when scarcely any Soviet composer of the post-war generation had been heard of, let alone heard, in this country, it was quite a coup for the 1967 Brighton Festival to have been able to present a performance of Sun of the Incas by Edison Denisov—and this only three years after the work was composed. Rough and ready as the Brighton performance undoubtedly was (with poorly cued parts and too little rehearsal time), it was readily apparent to performers and audience alike that this was no safe, middle-of-the-road music, but the work of a forward-looking composer with a voice of his own as distinctive as that of any of his western contemporaries. The same audience would certainly have been astonished to know that Denisov—like other now distinguished Soviet composers of the same generation—had been totally cut off from the literature of non-Russian 20th-century music in its entirety until the late 1950's: not a hint of any of the historic musical events of our time had been allowed to reach them—not even of the developments in pre-1914 Vienna. In Denisov's case it is still more surprising to learn that his own early environment had denied him the experience of music of any kind.

(On 21 May, while in Moscow for the International Festival of Contemporary Music (see TEMPO 150), a young New York violinist of the Citizen Exchange Council group and I met Alfred Schnittke, whose music is published in the West and who is, with Edison Denisov, probably the best-known contemporary Soviet composer outside the USSR. His styles swing a pendulum between free atonality and the neo-Romantic tonalism found in some parts of western Europe and America nowadays; his Fourth Violin Concerto, premièred in Berlin, will be played in Cleveland soon. Our conversation took place in a Moscow park, and was translated by Carlos Juris, a graduate student in piano of Moscow Conservatory.)

Kurtág's microludes are remarkable in at least two respects: firstly, some of them are so brief as to make even Webern seem verbose in comparison, and, secondly, Kurtág has managed to create something relatively rare—a form born of the chromatic scale itself The microludes are sets of 12 tiny preludes, one for each semitone. Each set moves from C to B by analogy to Bach's ‘48’; however, unlike the Bach pieces, the microludes are not essays in a particular tonality, but rather explore certain relationships to a particular individual pitch.

Peter Warlock's monograph on Delius (John Lane, The Bodley Head, London, 1923, revised edition 1952, pp. 31–2) quotes Delius's childhood reminiscences. They include this significant passage:

My first great musical impression was hearing the posthumous Valse of Chopin which a friend of my father's played for me when I was ten years old. It made an extraordinary impression on me … I remember that after hearing it twice I could play the whole piece through from memory.

On 26 November 1944 Heitor Villa-Lobos made his United States debut with the Janssen Symphony Orchestra in Los Angeles, followed during the ensuing weeks by appearances as composer-conductor in Boston, Chicago, and New York City (where he was also interviewed about his composing methods by Olin Downes, then music critic of The New York Times). All these events changed the composer's life completely: he was suddenly catapulted into the limelight, lionized and feted by prominent persons from musical and cultural life at a reception at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. A long-sought dream had unexpectedly come true: international recognition as a composer and as Latin America's foremost musical figure of his generation.

Nowadays, personal interpretations in performance may in some quarters be unfashionable, in some instances undesirable, but to some degree they are inevitable. In many cases, such interpretations can be revealing, in that they throw previously unsuspected light onto the music; despite their apparently unusual approach, they are quickly accepted and join the ranks of the authoritative. (One thinks, for example, of early performances by Maurizio Pollini of Schoenberg's piano music, where an Italian style of performance is brought to bear upon a German style of composition in a wholly convincing manner.) Stravinsky's deep-freeze interpretations, where the performer follows the instructions on the packet, delineate only one approach to the subject.