I'm afraid I risk boring readers with my opinions on the current crop of favourite Radio3 contemporary British composers.

Benjamin,Bingham,Burrell, Beamish, Ades,adn Weir all seem to me clever,well-educated people who have nothing creative to say .They can be relied on to produce something modestly respectable. Where are the composers today doing what Penderecki did in his heyday? My mind goes back to the premiere of his first symphony .Instantly recognisable as a strong,indivifdual statement.

Comparing that with  Weir is like comparing someone who stands up and says something you haven't thought of before in a passionate voice,with someone mumbling double -nagatives.

I don't know about using Penderecki as a shining example here, though, Smittims, striking though many of his works are (or should I say were), since a great deal of his music is quite derivative - the string clusters and glissandi he first became famous for in 1959-60 were suggested by the music of Xenakis and in particular his Metastaseis of 1954; passages in Penderecki's Canticum Canticorum Salomonis derive fairly directly from Stockhausen's Momente (which uses the same text), Penderecki's Partita for harpsichord and ensemble leans very heavily on Ligeti's Continuum, apart from which many aspects of Penderecki's music are clear descendants of ideas originated by his slightly older Polish contemporaries such as Lutoslawski and Tadeusz Baird. So I've always thought that his standing as an innovator (which is now long in the past, in any case) is somewhat unjustified. Having said that I agree completely with everything else you say!

Well, Robin Holloway was my teacher too, not that I'm sure I had much street cred even before admitting that, but anyway ...

I don't think Weir generally gets damned with quite the sort of faint praise you suggest, George - more often she seems to be placed in the 'witty/ironic outsider' camp, although sometimes on the basis of little more than that she's Scottish, female, and not given to overt displays of emotion.

I think A Night at the Chinese Opera could fairly be reckoned her masterpiece (though I'm perhaps unfashionable in preferring to think of that term in its original sense of (something like) 'A*-grade graduation piece'). I don't know her second opera The Vanishing Bridegroom, and Blond Eckbert seems to me to suffer from not having a punchline.

I'm not surprised you don't remember which chamber pieces you heard, as I tend to find the supposed wit and quirkiness rather hard to perceive amidst the surprisingly dense (however spare or lucidly-scored) pitch manipulations, and without the wit and quirkiness all I do hear is those manipulations, which makes me wonder if she's not quite the composer she's made out to be and if after all her music sometimes is ... well, I wouldn't like to say 'well-crafted', 'attractive', that sort of thing ...

For me her undoubted theatrical gifts are better served by the broader brushstrokes of the orchestral music (with and without voice), of which you'll get to hear plenty next January. I don't think I'm letting slip any secrets in saying that NMC's new disc of five such pieces should be ready around the same time, and, having recently been getting to know the five pieces in question quite well, I'd certainly say it's one to look forward to.

I'm a little lost by the notion that Weir has anything very much in common with Benjamin and/or Adès, or that any of those have anything in common with the to my ears significantly inferior talents of Bingham, Burrell and Beamish. Radio 3 airplay preferences aside, it does seem to me that these sorts of discussions are generally better served by differentiation rather than generalisation, and that if people were actually willing to say what they thought about specific composers/pieces, rather than having to be in the 'I love all [mainstream orchestral C21st music / Havergal Brian/Robert Simpson-esque C20th symphonic music / fill in the blank]' or 'I hate it' camp, then we might actually have some common ground for debate. In the same way, Weir (just like any other composer) seems to me ill-served by the generalised advertising-slogan approach, which is why I've taken some trouble to explain why I 'get' her chamber music much less than everything else she does.

Then you (and no doubt the rest of us too) are in for a treat early this afternoon, smittims, with the premiere of Huw Watkins' 'Dream' in the 1.00 Lunchtime Concert.

Not only that but it's a BBC commission or joint commission? (It's not altogether clear from the Radio Times or the web-page.) 

Not very many, i'faith. I do think the First Symphony is possibly his finest work, although for me it's a toss-up between that and Utrenja.

I remember a seminar with JW when that conservatism, hiding  I suspect a doughty tough -mindedness, was
very apparent. But then she goes and writes choral/orchestrally 'Moon and Star' where the lushness and longing in Emily Dickinson-and a certain strain of the  feminine-is just beautifully expressed, and without excess. Its the Scots/prairie equivalent of  Villa-Lobos I think, in terms of its cultural fertility, and in the broadest sense  its a love song. I have to say also I disagree with the low opinion of Beamish and Bingham-again there's a certain conservatism that yields creative fire, a (whatever the female equivalent of 'mastery' is ) of form and texture.
Give JB a brass band for example and she brings forth fresh colours and (not literally) fecundity.