<<  -- 3 --  Roderic Dunnett    MUSSORGSKIAN GIANT

It sounds a surprising pedigree for the composer of Higglety Pigglety Pop! and Hums and Songs of Winnie-the-Pooh (another protégé, Julian Anderson, talks of the 'childlike playfulness' Knussen exudes in his writing, as well as the quality 'There isn't anything you can discard') -- although Music for a Puppet Court, his Tudor puzzle canon arrangement, seems not a far cry to Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies's l960s experiments (Kinloche his Fantassie; Seven in nomine) and the neo-Baroque arrangements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Much of Knussen's music was originally composed with specific performers in mind -- the pianist Peter Serkin, the soprano Jane Manning (the five Rilke songs), or in the case of his subtle and delicate Whitman Settings, Lucy Shelton, whose subtle and sparse use of large orchestra (akin to the limpid slow passages in his orchestral Songs without Voices) seems a case of the 'gentle giant' at work again -- the very reverse, for instance, of his trumpeting, expressionistic early Trakl setting.

Knussen admits to qualms about the current lurch towards 'accessibility' in music, but admits 'I'm beginning to wonder' (like Boulez before him) 'whether the orchestra is possibly a museum, and whether composers of my age should be thinking of doing things that reach more people, not just through a simplification of style but by finding a different medium'. His 'ideal listener', he says, is 'someone who knows bugger all about new music but is not hostile, and is prepared to be taken by the hand and be surprised.'

Oliver Knussen conducts the CBSO in concerts in Birmingham's Symphony Hall on Thursday 22 and Saturday 24 November 2001 and on Friday 23 November at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. He will direct the London Sinfonietta in the world première of Marc-Anthony Turnage's Dark Crossing at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall at 7.45pm on 1 February 2002.