I'd forgotten this one (probably on account of the cover, a real terror): it's on its way, though; he's a conductor with a favourable track record in Stravinsky AFAIC.....

Now that's one of those revelatory Ron comments that changes the way you think of things. That had never occurred to me before.

I can't find anything about it in Moving Into Aquarius, tinners, (there's, surprisingly, far more than I had remembered about The Rake's Progress though). There is this bit in The Twentieth Century Blues which may have been what you were thinking of:

"Particularly stimulating for me was his [John Minchinton's] conducting of a late work of Stravinsky, Agon, in 1958, which was germane to my current compositional enterprise, King Priam. From Stravinsky's instrumentation I derived some clues as to how to deploy an operatic orchestra in an entirely new way - treating solo instrments as equals both within the ensemble and against the voices on stage, writing for heterogeneous mixtures of instruments."

I must have read that before but it hadn't sunk in previously.

George, when I said Moving into Aquarius of course I didn't actually mean Moving into Aquarius! Do you have a copy of this book? Does it have an index? (I'm not at home so I can't check mine.) I'd hate to send you on another wild goose chase but I think it might be in there somewhere. The Twentieth-Century Blues quote says the same thing but is not the specific quote I had in mind, if you see what I mean.

Richard, you could always just send me a message ...

I do indeed, tinners, and it does have an index. Several references to Stravinsky works (including a whole Chapter on Les Noces) but nothing on Agon it would seem.

[Later: There's a brief passage on the Agon/Priam resonances in Chapter 4 of Ian Kemp's book Tippett, The Composer and His Music (page 344 in the edition I've got) but the quotes from Tippett that he uses are essentially the same ones as in 20th Century Blues.]
 
Incidentally the best performance I have heard was Abbado with the LSO but then, as we have recently been reminded , he is an absolute master of orchestral balance. A wonderful Stravinsky conductor IMHO but AFAIK he doesn't programme him so much these days and, having just done a quick google check, there doesn't seem to be a recording.

Not at all! I love this sort of thing and have got quite excited by the whole Agon/Priam connection.

Thanks guys, er, I really wanted it for the cover, er, Veronika made me do it. Mind you, I would really like to have a listen to Priam one of these days, I haven't heard that since before I jettisoned the LP collection in '93 

Abbado is a strange case. For someone whose "commitment" to contemporary music is so often mentioned, he doesn't actually stray past the first couple of decades of the twentieth century that often. I seem to remember reading somewhere that he doesn't like spending a lot of time rehearsing, which wouldn't have done Groups any favours at all.

As well as Gruppen, there was some Nono and Dallapiccola when he was with the LSO in London but they did tend to be hall emptiers   (But I appreciate you said 'not that often', and it wasn't, possibly because of the hall-emptying factor.)