I’VE been thinking a lot this week about composers of different generations and eras, about their individual diversity, their willingness to adapt to different, often unexpected, circumstances, their imaginative versatility, and, above all, their need to "do their own thing", and get their music out there, played, heard and disseminated as widely as possible.

Think of Shostakovich: not the great symphonist with his 15 works in that genre, or the chamber music composer with 15 string quartets to his name; Shostakovich was a film composer too, and, as a young pianist, played and improvised the accompaniments and soundtracks to silent movies.

Or think of Bartok, commissioned by Benny Goodman to write a piece for clarinet, violin and piano. The King of Swing was a shrewd character who knew his classical music. He was familiar with the great pieces by Mozart and Brahms that featured the clarinet, and his research for the commission from Bartok was to study the Hungarian’s compositions, style and musical language. Bartok’s research was to listen widely to recordings of Goodman playing. Goodman wanted a pair of self-standing pieces that would fit neatly onto two sides of a 78rpm record. He also specified a cadenza each for violinist and clarinettist. Bartok got his fee and Goodman got more than he expected. Bartok grew the commission into a three-movement work, entitled Contrasts. Moreover, despite the rhythmic animation of the music, it is pure Bartok, with his own accent and without a trace of swing or jazzy inflection, which wouldn’t have been what Goodman wanted anyway. It’s a wee masterpiece, of which a new recording was reviewed in The Herald recently.

Even Beethoven, with whom one would not associate the notion of compromise, was remarkably responsive and versatile when issues blew up with his complex String Quartet in B flat, Opus 130. He was asked (very politely, and cautiously, I fondly imagine) if he would write an alternative finale to the one he had composed, entitled The Great Fugue, as it was too difficult, almost unplayable, and near-incomprehensible to mere mortals. And he did just that. Then, with a good sense and eye for his own property, Beethoven detached the fugue, the original finale of opus 130, and gave it a new number, opus 133. But that wasn’t the end of it. Beethoven’s publisher revealed there was a demand for an arrangement for piano duet of that finale. Beethoven, for whatever reason, didn’t want to do it, so the publisher handed it over for a minor musical figure to write the duet version. Beethoven saw the result – oh, to have been a fly on the wall at that moment – and decided to do it himself after all. It’s widely played and recorded now. So, out of that original string quartet, Beethoven got himself four sibling works: the opus 130 quartet with the replacement finale, the original quartet with the Great Fugue as finale, the Great Fugue alone, as opus 133, and the Great Fugue as a piano duet, with the opus number 134. And to cap that entire saga of the 1820s, there is a real historical bulls-eye of a bonus – it’s only about 15 years since the autograph of that piano duet version, in Beethoven’s own handwriting, turned up, in the United States of all places. It was authenticated, auctioned, and given over in care to the Juilliard School of Music.

But let’s not forget Mozart and his three piano concertos, K413, 414 and 415, written quite deliberately in two very different forms, one with full orchestra of strings, woodwind and horns, and occasional brass, and the other version, aimed at a wider, more domestic market, for solo piano with just a string quartet in accompaniment. Mozart was quite clear what he was doing: he went his mile to publicise his effort and intentions. He took out an advert in the Wiener Zeitung (Vienna Times) on January 15, 1783: “Herr Kapellmeister Mozart hereby informs the highly honoured public of the publication of three new, recently completed piano concertos. These three concertos, which may be performed with a large orchestra with wind instruments, or merely with two violins, one viola and violoncello, will not appear until early April this year, and will be available, finely copied and supervised by the composer himself, only to those who have subscribed to them.”

Poor Mozart initially had no luck. He placed the advert twice more in the Times. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to have the concertos taken on by a Paris publisher. He persisted, and a year or so later, his multi-functional concertos were printed in Vienna. What a canny lot, these composer chaps. And there’s a splendid new recording of the three concertos with fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra.