It seems one has to start with Isobel Gowdie. Whatever neophobic propogandists may say, there have been warm receptions for other new works at Promenade Concerts, but the thunderous, ecstatic welcome given to James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the 1990 Proms was unprecedented. What made it more remarkable was that this was a capacity Saturday night audience, largely attracted – or so one presumes – by Beethoven's Fourth Symphony and the prospect of hearing the brilliant young Korean violinist Dong Suk-Kang play the Sibelius Violin Concerto. What proportion of that audience was further lured by the picture in the Proms brochure of the good-looking young man, posing moodily in front of the Glasgow Celtic football ground, and the article underneath, with its promise of a heady mixture of catholic-socialist-Scottish indignation, is anybody's guess – but it can't have been the majority.

When in 1957 Igor Markevitch and Georges Auric commissioned the 32-year-old Pierre Boulez, fresh from the success of his Marteau sans maître, to write a work for the Société des concerts Lamoureux, the result was an eightminute symphonic torso, Doubles, whose gripping intensity, heroic utterance, and vivid orchestral imagery marked it as potentially one of the composer's most important creative efforts. Announced at its Paris première on 16 March 1958 as the beginning of an ambitious work-inprogress, it was not heard again until January 1964, when the first ten minutes of a revision entitled Figures Doubles Prismes were presented by the Südwestfunk Orchestra in Basle. Instead of adding the expansive second stage of Doubles – which had been mapped out and in part actually composed in particell – the revision opened up the existing first stage by interpolating new episodes of contrasting character. Though the plan of the revision called for a total duration of about 30 minutes (toward which an additional five minutes of music were composed and introduced at the Hague by Het Residentieorkest in 1968), a shift of career focus by the composer in 1971 to conducting and electronic research brought progress on this and several other major projects to an indefinite halt. As a consequence, the intended but still unrealized overall shape of Figures Doubles Prismes, as well as of its forerunner, Doubles, can be appreciated, at least for the time being, only from manuscripts on deposit at Switzerland's Paul Sacher Foundation.

Thirty-six years after the completion of September from the Vier Letzte Leider, presumed to be the last work penned by Richard Strauss, an autograph manuscript reappeared containing a lied composed for solo voice and piano, and it is this which is now considered to be the last completed work of Strauss. It is entided Malven (Mallows), set to the poem by Swiss poet and novelist, Betty Wehrli-Knobel (b. 13 July 1904). The lied was completed in Montreux on 23 November 1948, a full two months after Strauss had finished September, and bears the dedication to Maria Jeritza: Der geliebten Maria dieser letzte Rose!

• Goehr in Boston Rodney Lister

• ‘Gomorra’ in Vienna Laurence Hughes

• Portrait of Helmut Lachenmann Elke Hockings

• Stephen Montague at 50 Malcolm Miller

• RAM ‘Da Capo – From the Beginning’ Festival Laurence Hughes

• Ixion Concert Laurence Hughes

• Sorabji Ronald Stevenson

• New Tonality and Experimental Music David Wright

• Samuel Barber Martin Anderson

• Silvina Milstein's Schoenberg Kenneth Gloag

• The Oxford History of New Zealand Music Gary Brain

• ‘Stone Litany/Black Pentecost’ John Warnaby

• Birtwistle on NMC Antony Bye

• Modern British Guy Rickards

• Xenakis Chamber Music Nicolas Hodges

• The Essential Gorecki John Warnaby

• Vagn Holmboe series Guy Rickards 51

• Contemporary Accordion Robin Freeman

• Finnish Piano Music Martin Anderson

• Othmar Schoeck on disc Peter Palmer

• Piano Miscellany Calum MacDonald