Elliott Carter's new work for the London Sinfonietta, In Sleep, In Thunder, is a setting of six poems by Robert Lowell scored for tenor and fourteen instrumentalists and composed ‘in memory of the poet and friend’. With it Carter completes a triptych on contemporary American poetry that began with A Mirror on Which to Dwell (six poems of Elizabeth Bishop) and continued with Syringa, on the poem of that name by John Ashbery. Since Lowell himself suggested to the composer the initial choice of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry it seems appropriate that Lowell should receive a parallel (though posthumous) tribute.

Immediately after the composition of the Gulyás cycle, Kurtág seems to have run into a second period of uncertainty as to how to proceed: this time understandably, since the Bornemisza cycle must have completely exhausted the obvious possibilities of what had started as a reductive language of bold, succinct gestures. True, the cycle had developed ways of expressive extension, but they were mostly sui generis, closely involved with the special qualities of Bornemisza's sermons. To have continued that line without self-repetition would perhaps have been impossible. The one obvious gain from the work, apart from the music itself of course, was the discovery of Kurtág's affinity with the voice and his evolution of a superbly versatile repertoire of vocal techniques and treatments.

Bernard Benoliel is best known, perhaps, as the Secretary of the RVW Trust—a position he has held for the last 4½ years. But his reputation as a postserial composer has been growing recently, largely through BBC broadcasts of his music. The forthcoming world premiere of his Symphony makes this a particularly fruitful time to introduce a remarkable and highly individual body of work.