His String Quartet was first performed in Stockholm in 1965, followed the same year by the first performance of his orchestral song-cycle Paroles tissées.
By the fourth performance, the musicians were visibly enjoying themselves.
It will be preceded by the first performance of a trumpet fanfare he wrote as a birthday present to his son, Andrew Burgess Wilson.
But this may have been first-night jitters; he had a nice sense of the music, and some of these relationship problems, at least, could be ironed out by the second performance.
Then I'd had a really difficult time with the Saturday matinee, and the doctor gave me an antibiotic and some sort of decongestant, and by the second performance, my hands were shaking.
The young Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti made a dashing début as Edgardo in "Lucia di Lammermoor," and acquired a fan club in the upper balconies by the fifth performance.
And it will no doubt be fine-tuned (burning the American and Israeli flags had already been dropped by the fourth performance) in its subsequent journey to eight other European cities, ending up at the Paris Opera in 2005.
But the sonata isn't just an incessant pianistic battering ram: in just seven minutes, the piece creates a gigantic drama, in which there's melody – listen to the top notes of each of the hammered-out clusters; there are tunes in this piece, I promise – and a ferocious emotional concentration, embodied by the first performance indication, "Espressivissimo" – as expressively as possible.
As part of the celebrations for the centenary of the composer's birth in January 2005, English National Opera staged a dramatised performance of the work, directed by Jonathan Kent coincidentally, the first performance fell in the week of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps at Auschwitz.
