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Humphrey Searle's opera, The Diary of a Madman, is based on a story by Gogol.

May I just add my heartfelt thanks for the Vitols works?  This composer was completely unknown to me, and what I've heard of his music so far is wonderful - the Gems really are that!  It's amazing that such tuneful, beautifully orchestrated music isn't a part of the repertoire. 

Since this seems to have mutated from the "Havergal Brian Gothic Symphony from Hyperion" forum to the "Ooo Those Awful Critics!" forum, I thought I'd throw in my two cents' worth.

Kenneth Tynan once wrote that criticism was not a science; it was, alas, an art.  Is it possible to have great critics without great art?  I'm fifty-six years old.  Into my early adulthood, there lived great composers who were universally acknowledged as great composers during their lifetimes:  Shostakovich, Britten, Copland, Messiaen (whom I was lucky enough to meet).  Even Stravinsky made it through most of my adolescence.  Who has that kind of career anymore?  What composer's new work elicits headlines, apart from the scandalous or provocatively controversial kinds?  Today's music critics don't live in that kind of atmosphere.  All too often, their concept of greatness (if they have one) is our concept of mediocrity, because that's all they really know.  Some reject the very idea of greatness as too "elitist" and concentrate on the invidious comparison of contemporary performances of acknowledged classics with earlier performances of acknowledged classics; some embrace elitism and concentrate on the obscure, the outrageous and the determinedly unpopular.  In both cases, they're marginalizing themselves. 

But why not? The arts are marginalized in the United States, certainly, and to some extent in Britain, from what I read.  Musical education has have been excised from most of our schools.  Many American cities have no classical radio stations.  Most of our newspapers - those that are left - have slashed their arts coverage to the point where potentially first-rate critics have nowhere to go, except perhaps the internet, where everyone with an opinion is considered a critic.  Classical music is - and let's face it, always has been - a minority taste.  Contemporary capitalism can't accommodate minority tastes, so classical music is left to the enthusiasts and the opportunists.  All too many critics today - and all too many composers, and all too many performers - are one or the other (or in rare cases, both).  Why bother to be great?

He just came to my notice a day or two ago as well.  (Our last names are pronounced the same way.)  His second string quartet is very pretty - there's nothing in it that couldn't have been written in the first five years of the twentieth century.  YouTube has some orchestral snippets from his only opera; in terms both of its plot and the music I've heard, it sounds awfully saccharine.  There are some good songs, though.

Thanks for the Kadosa symphonies!  However, I notice that in the fourth movement of the eight symphony, around 6:13, the music starts to go into an endless loop, as if the record were skipping, and it continues in that loop until the end. 

I hate to say this, but the four mp3 files claiming to be the four movements of Ruth Gipps's Symphony #3 are in fact the four movements of Grace Williams's Symphony #2.  I recognized the opening measures as soon as I heard them - I've had a recording of the latter for many years and have listened to it often

Those wacky Australians!  Actually, I like Burt Bacharach's music a lot, but I wouldn't even name him the greatest living pop composer of the 1960s (that would have to be Paul McCartney).  Still, this is not quite on the order of the French idolization of Jerry Lewis.

The BSO does broadcast live every Saturday night (if the orchestra isn't playing, they usually play recordings of the orchestra).  Here's the website:  http://www.wgbh.org/995/bso.cfm.

I sit corrected.

In my years singing with Boston's Chorus pro Musica we sang a lot of music by little-known (at least at the time) composers, and a number of these works, which I have never sung or even heard again, were by unsung composers.  The American composer Lee Hoiby wrote a lovely cantata, A Hymn of the Nativity, which I remember at least partly because it concluded with a choral fugue on a theme that sounded remarkably like that of an old Alka-Seltzer television commercial ("Pop, pop, fizz, fizz, Oh, what a relief it is!").  And there was another cantata, Christmas Rhapsody, by a very unsung English composer and organist named Jasper Rooper.  This is almost 40 years ago now, but they're both relatively substantial works that would benefit from more frequent performances.

And, Albion, let me thank you for the Burgess symphony.  I'm a great admirer of his books and have been longing to hear some others of his works (beyond his piano concerto, which I discovered by a fluke).  This is a boon!

These are the discontents of democracy.  Such goings-on were unheard-of when audiences consisted of a nobleman's court.

I will add, however, that this sort of behavior is only typical with audiences for the Boston Symphony or the Handel & Haydn Society.  Benjamin Zander has an extremely loyal and enthusiastic audience for his Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and they tend to stick around until the final curtain call.

I've been attending concerts in Boston since 1972.  From my observation, it's always been the norm.  I used to think it was because people were trying to catch the last commuter train to their suburban homes, until I found out that most commuter trains stop running out of Boston before the Saturday night symphony concert finishes.  Many people leave as soon as they can because there are only a handful of parking lots in the area around Symphony Hall, and they want to get their cars out and on the road before everybody else leaving the concert does the same.  I think it's also just mindless rudeness:  they've heard their music, they've gotten what they came for, and now they're leaving.  Audiences of the Boston Symphony, like those of many long-established orchestras (at least in America), are not uniformly made up of music-lovers.  Many come to see and be seen, or because it's good for business, or because the tickets have been in the family since the turn of the 20th century.  Classical music is considered by many prominent (i. e. wealthy) people to be a civic obligation as much as anything else.  And it's a tax write-off. 

I don't know if I could come up with a top ten offhand, but the symphonies from the last 50 years that speak to me most strongly are:

Shostakovich 13th (one of my absolute favorite symphonies regardless of when composed)
Tippett 3rd
Harbison 1st
George Lloyd 8th
Havergal Brian 21st
Arnold 5th
Lutoslawski 3rd

And I suppose listing the Elgar/Payne 3rd symphony would be cheating . . .