So that leaves a disc of orchestral works by Colin Matthews and Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortileges conducted by Charles Dutoit

So that leaves a disc of orchestral works by Colin Matthews and Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortileges conducted by Charles Dutoit.The Matthews works (DG 447 067 2) are very demanding - in one review I called Suns Dance and Broken Symmetry "dance till you drop" pieces. But there have been times when I've found in them a perfect outlet for pent-up rage or surplaas energy - especially in these exhilarating, superbly recorded performances by Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta.L'Enfant et les sortileges (Decca 440 333 2) may seem a huge leap from Matthews, but Dutoit and his main soloist, Colette Alliot-Lugaz, find dark depths in this music as well as the tenderness, colour and imaginative super-resourcefulness normally associated with Ravel. The Symphonies Nos 8 and 9 of the veteran Danish composer Vagn Holmboe (BIS CD 618) still impress, still reveal more each time I listen, and still sound utterly different. The Eighth runs its course like a great northern river; while the Ninth can seem more like a collage of sights and sounds revealed in dreams, but it too has its own persuasive logic.

The Aarhus Symphony Orchestra plays with tremendous authority for Owain Arwel Hughes - have we underrated him?The first release in Stephen Kovacevich's cycle of Schubert piano sonatas does seem to have been strangely underrated - or at least underproclaimed. The scribe who copied out the music added a note: "Not even the words of the gloomy prophet sound so sad as the sad music of my composer." Peter Philips and his virtuoso Tallis Scholars bring out that intensity, but with dignity, restraint and elegance fitting to music that's so finely crafted.My record of the year? Perhaps, but two other discs have run it close in the listening stakes. As I've realised, listening repeatedly, White has a sound-world of his own: slow-moving, less intricate than Byrd or Tallis, backward-looking in a time of great change, but wonderfully expressive, especially in the great five-part setting of the Lamentations (Gimell CDGIM 030). So here goes.According to the sales charts, renaissance choral polyphony has been going through a renaissance of its own for some time. Is it, as some have suggested, that people simply fall for the ethereal sounds and the evocation of a mythical "Age of Faith"? If so, the Tudor composer Robert White will probably create the required mood as well as any of his contemporaries.But there are good reasons for listening closer. His CD, 'Nikolai Demidenko Live at the Wigmore Hall' is on Hyperion A667781/2. His next solo recital in London is at the Barbican on 11 Feb.

'Is it that people simply fall for the ethereal sounds and the evocation of a mythical "Age of Faith"? If so, Robert White will probably create the required mood as well as any of his contemporaries' There are two ways of doing this. I could affect Olympian detachment and announce the "best" records of 1995, or I could simply list the five new discs that have come down off my shelves most often Option No 2 feels more honest; it's also easier. If I ever catch myself not thinking of my music, I'll change my profession."n Nikolai Demidenko plays Prokofiev, 7.30 pm tonight, RFH, London SE1 (0171-960 4242). She can't be pregnant for three or four hours a day - it's everything to her, all the time. As a pianist, you've got to live music 24 hours a day, in traffic jams, on trains, even when you are sleeping, which is when you can sometimes solve musical problems. "It may be a problem with my upbringing, but for me, music has to be emotional communication If it is created cerebrally, it doesn't move me.

I love Scriabin's music, but in his late pieces I feel he's playing with millions of shards of a broken mirror which he can't glue back together I feel the same about Stravinsky and Prokofiev. There is a confidence, an integrity of thought and feeling in Romantic music, which is now lost for ever."Demidenko seems a happy man, in the grip of a magnificent - and marketable - obsession "Performing music is like a woman being pregnant. They can give me sounds and colours I never heard before, which I can try to re-create on the piano." He is an ardent admirer of Peter Gabriel: "I know classical composers who would give half their lives for the ability to write melodies like his." So what does he think of classical music's contemporary greats?Not much. It takes generations to build up a tradition like the one we had but only a few years to destroy it." Last week, to his great delight, he was granted a British passport. Does he go back home to play? "No."He looks back in gratitude to his privileged days in Moscow when Gilels and Richter were regularly performing there.

But he is now exploring electronic music and unwinds at night by creating computer programs for his own compositions.He plays me a recording of the Gershwin concert he gave with Izao Tomita in New York's Battery Park, with 100,000 people in the audience "Synthesisers are actually a source of inspiration. It can lead to tragedy." He suggests that musical education, including the reading of scores, should become part of the universal curriculum, and that the army of disappointed virtuosos could be absorbed as teachers. "That might help prevent those broken lives."He counts himself lucky to have trained under the best system of music education in the world, but one that is now in the past, with its leading lights either dead, retired or teaching abroad "Life in Russia is now simply a struggle for survival People are not interested in music. "Unless the child was close to genius, I would strongly advise against their going into it If you want to make money, there are far easier ways. Pianistic virtuosity is a form of Darwinism - natural selection, with the public as arbiter. And he well remembers the three-year-old Kissin's audition at the school: "He was tense and wordless, but completely and entirely a genius. He played Rachmaninov's Second with his tiny little hands, and though he obviously couldn't play all the notes, he could pick them out individually for any given chord.