In his work Dr. Lozanov only talks about music from the Viennese classicists like Mozart and Haydn for the active concert-reading and high baroque works for the relaxed concert-reading; this reflects the results of his experiments of course, but his experiments were limited by the range of music and musical knowledge which he had access to in his culture and time, communist Bulgaria.

Since then there has been a revolution in the world of historic performance of early music, so that two things have happened which it seems he never even had a chance of hearing:

• one is the whole vast new repertoire of music has become available;
• the other is that early music is often performed in exciting ways which reflect the thinking of the people who first produced this music, rather than in the 19thC tradition which permeated the world of 'classical' music at the time Lozanov was developing his revolutionary ideas.

In particular the music of two periods present a fascinating palette of choice which repays attention: one is the earlier baroque period, from 1600-1700, music by composers such as Dietrich Buxtehude, Matthew Locke, Jean Baptiste Lully, who had a much closer connection to the rhetorical tradition and is much more clearly based on 'text-thinking' than that of Mozart and Haydn's time. The other is the style called 'rococo' or 'gallant', used by Mozart's father Leopold and the sons of Sebastian Bach - notably Carl Philip Emanuel - between about 1730 and 1780, which feature a great richness of contrasting melodies which is not part of the baroque style, together with a sense of 'not a note too much' and a freshness which many find missing in the classical period.

We also need to recognise that the means of expression used in earlier music are much more delicate and subtle than those of later music: we are looking, not at a Wagnerian chorus of blacksmiths banging their anvils on the banks of the Rhine, but at a gossamer trio of Graces weaving filigree figures in a sylvan grove.

'To go from Romantic music to early music is to leave aside oil painting for a while to discover the nuances of drawing'

(Morgan Niklasson)