I see what you're getting at with making strange a neo-Romantic style, Ian, but my feeling listening last night was more than that.* The well-trodden paths in question are clear quotations, with well-established, Romantic, emotive associations, which get gradually erased through repetition, ruptures in the timing, dynamic fade-outs and other devices. I don't think it's a question of appealing to something modern, as such, but rather something to do with suspending something between the old familiarities and their impossibility today. Ghostly and elegiac, at least that's how it felt to me (at least part of which may be to do with the historical/geographical context, I'm sure). Quite different from the other approaches you mention, Ian, in that the original models are pushed right to the fore, and only gently undermined.

*The Silvestrov pieces on the same disc might more easily be accused of cynically modernising the Romantic, although I wouldn't necessarily go that far just yet. They just didn't work as well for me.

You may be right, but what I liked here was that this was the non-radicalism, the light touch. What Rabinovich does technically is to disturb the continuity (of harmonic rhythm, melodic development, etc) that one automatically expects from the music he is quoting (and the quotes are made at length), so that there is a tension between what you're hearing, what you think you're hearing, and what you are recalling from memory.

I'm not saying he's a new Richard Strauss or anything, but I found it very effective. 

It was one RB.

There certainly is much more to Strauss than that - the point is that such a strategy does not necessarily progress any further beyond what Strauss achieved, whilst achieving considerably more as well.

I really don't know what exactly you are saying above. I can't share your view of Holloway's work; it seems to me (like that of many a British composer, especially those associated with Oxbridge) to have little in the way of emotional content, or to provoke and stimulate the mind, or to enter into some meaningful relationship with the rest of the world and its cultural side; rather simply to exhibit various self-consciously 'musical' attributes which the musically educated can tick off in the right boxes, of which they can feel they are terribly clever/sophisticated/musically refined for having identified. In other words, it is music that serves no purpose other than a wholly reactionary one - to bolster the and help consolidate the socially divisive status of an elite. If asked by people outside of this bottom-patting gentlemen's club what relevance this music might be to them, to their lives, or anything else, I would have to answer 'none' - it's music like that which makes that question itself all the more meaningful, I reckon. I don't know everything of his, and would be prepared to reconsider if any suggested a work to which I might have a different response.

I was meaning in a teaching context, TF, as we've discussed at another place, in terms of the sorts of things that I've tended to find those from non-classical-music-educated backgrounds tend to think of as being relevant.

That would be a better way of putting it.

I don't necessarily disagree, but in terms of framing why people might 'get something out of' listening in the first place, if they haven't already done so, then it's different. There's only a limited amount of time to listen to a fraction of all the many types of music in the world, and everyone makes some choices in that respect.

Sir Simon Ratle's recording of Brahm's Eine Deutsche Requiem. Not bad, considering the time of day!!

Then after this I am still on my VW/Elgar Collector's Edition. A fascinating journey with these two composers.

Funnily enough, we were listening to it on a long journey yesterday.  My companion thought it lacked a bit of oomph somewhere, and the sound was a tad distant.

Madetoja Symphony No.1

If you haven't heard any Madetoja, do so now!

There's a link to some samples here.

Tommo

Still haven't got it have you bbm?