Radio 3's Fifty Modern Classics

Composer and writer Gerard McBurney nominates the austere and uncompromising Octet by Galina Ustvolskaya, which changed his ideas of modern Russian music; and Gillian Moore highlights the intensity of this work, completed in 1950, in the shadow of the Soviet Zhdanov decree.

Pianist Joanna MacGregor celebrates Harrison Birtwistle’s The Triumph of Time, an orchestral work she describes as “sculpted, dream-like and mesmeric”; Paul Griffiths remembers the London premiere and how it marked a new departure for the composer, and Birtwistle himself reflects on the subject of time in music.

Choreographer Siobhan Davies nominates White Man Sleeps by the South African-born composer Kevin Volans, and describes the experience of her collaboration with the composer; writer Paul Griffiths puts the work in the context of Cologne in the late 1970s; and Volans himself explains how he set out to integrate African and European aesthetics in this piece, which draws on traditional music from southern Africa and is scored for viola da gamba, two harpsichords and percussion.

Gillian Moore champions George Benjamin’s early orchestral score At First Light, praising its “extraordinary detail and skill”; while writer and critic Paul Griffiths assesses the significance of the work for British composing in the 1980s.

Composer George Benjamin advocates the "exuberant, thrilling and virtuosic" orchestral piece Chronochromie by his former teacher, Olivier Messiaen; while Paul Griffiths describes the significance of this work in the European avant-garde scene of the 1960s.

Hollywood sound designer and film editor Walter Murch nominates Symphonie pour un homme seul by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, music he first heard on the radio as a schoolboy and which influenced his subsequent work in the field of film sound. Author and journalist Rob Young puts the work in the context of post-war Paris and Schaeffer’s early experiments at French Radio which led to the birth of musique concrete.

Composer Nico Muhly nominates Philip Glass's Music in Twelve Parts, a large-scale set of pieces for electric organs, voice, flutes and saxophones which is considered to be an early masterpiece of the New York minimalist. Gillian Moore puts the work in context and suggests how this numerical process music attains its human quality through the choice of sounds.

Writer and critic Paul Driver explains why Maxwell Davies’s 8 Songs For A Mad King is so uniquely important in the development of music theatre; and the Viennese composer and chansonnier HK Gruber describes the work from the inside, as a performer who has sung the taxing part of the King many times.

Violinist David Harrington celebrates George Crumb's groundbreaking 1970 work for electric string quartet, Black Angels - the work which inspired him to form the Kronos Quartet. Gillian Moore puts the piece in context, as a work full of dark foreboding and extreme sounds, in direct reaction to the Vietnam War.

Composer Anna Meredith nominates Gerald Barry's "bold and daring" Piano Quartet No.1, with commentary from an established interpreter of Barry's music, conductor Richard Baker.