I've seen Nicholas Isherwood perform it twice, and he and more or less this same group have played it dozens of times. I find him a very impressive singer indeed, and this piece (which surprised me more than it ought to have done) as immediate and "relevant" as when it was written, if not more so.

I think it's a somewhat different case from some of the things we've discussed back on the Haubenstock-Ramati thread, because Henze had worked extensively with all the performers while the piece was being written (at least I assume he had) so that the score is more a mnemonic for reproducing what did happen rather than for influencing what might happen. Of course, with different performers, it's "just" a graphic score again, although it indicates possibilities within a fairly precisely-conceived musical and dramatic concept, which puts it in a different category from scores whose overall form is variable or which (like December 1952) give you hardly any clues at all. Henze was always a bit tentative and indeed pragmatic in adopting "avant-garde" techniques like graphic notation or electronics, don't you think? and he abandoned them after a fairly short time anyway.

I just thought I ought to draw the attention of those interested in Henze's music to the fact that the latest 4 instalments of the Avant Garde Project (www.avantgardeproject.org) are dedicated to it, and feature such essential pieces (mostly released on Decca in the 1970s and performed by the London Sinfonietta in its heyday) as Compases para reguntas ensimismadas for viola and orchestra, the early Apollo und Hyazinthus and Kammermusik 1958 as well as several film scores.

The Decca catalogue as such hardly exists now: the obvious sellers are packaged and repackaged, and often available in parallel versions simultaneously, whilst everything else languishes.

Things have not been helped by the selling and re-selling of the parent company either, so that the very helpful British Music Collection series was not only stopped dead in its tracks but virtually killed off completely at the last change of ownership. On the other hand, there have been some encouraging signs of out-of-the-box (or more accurately into-the-box) thinking, with collections into cheap boxes of virtually all the Polygram Tippett recordings, an ongoing re-issue of the Britten archive, the Malcolm Arnold sets (including material from other companies) and some unexpected arrivals such as the Ashkenazy Shostakovich cycle (with a new 4). More items have been leased to other companies, too, such as some of the Headline series (Cage, Henze, Takemitsu, Gerhard and Panufnik). But personally I'd not expect many of these issues to stay around for ever. I'm afraid the golden rule is 'if you see it, grab it!'.

No Evan, you durst not: after a blaze of pre-publicity, the Explore series, which started out with such high hopes, limped into the stores way behind schedule, and waited for ages before announcing a second release, which won't be from the Headline series at all (in fact it's jazz-based).

Sic transit gloria Transit...

Hmm.  All this Transit talk makes me think I should have placed a higher bid when the LP came up on eBay a while back.  This is quickly turning into a bit of a white whale for me (although I do have my trusty cassette made in the SUNY Buffalo library a few years back)... and I'm not even sure I like the piece that much.

Apparently so, Richard, although I've never seen it either and there's no image here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Compases-Violin-Concerto-Apollo-Hyazinthus/dp/B00000E4M4/ref=sr_1_1/026-9539117-0494024?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1183741837&sr=8-1

Maybe part of the 'Henze Edition' with white covers bordered in purple and yellow? (I have the Fischer-Dieskau Versuch über Schweine from that series.)