It was a great choral honour to find out (as usual, by accident) that Peter Phillips was going to include my setting of a Marian antiphon, Ave Regina Caelorum, in a Tallis Scholars evening centred round a Mass by Tomas Luis de Victoria. If I have ever written a Victoria-like piece (in my imagination, dark, impassioned, Spanish) this is it.   I have listened many times to recordings by this legendary group, but I don't think I've ever been to one of their concerts before. It

It's wonderful to report that after their thrilling performance of The Welcome Arrival of Rain at the Barbican last night, Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra will be playing the piece again next week, on tour in Shanghai and Beijing . (It's probably just as well that I won't be boarding the planes with them, but nice to contemplate from afar, and hopefully sometime on BBC Radio 3.)   My photo shows Warwick Avenue Tube station, gateway to Maida Vale Studios for all

I've just returned from Cardiff, where my Oboe Concerto was the set work at this year's Crowther's of Canterbury Oboe Prize, competed for by oboists from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. The original dedicatee, Celia Craig , all the way from Adelaide, Australia, was on hand to lead a woodwind residency; and we worked out that during the Concerto's 2018 UK premiere (by the BBCNOW orchestra) RWCMD's Head of Woodwind, Robert Plane , had been playing the Concerto's p