Can Putin’s conductor redeem himself?
Gergiev’s road to redemption
Bring on the big beasts
Music needs heavyweight champions to stand up for truth and excellence
Gustav Mahler: 4th symphony (Pentatone)
A new recording of Mahler’s smallest symphony is “indispensable” to connoisseurs of his music
British piano concertos (Lyrita); British music for strings #3 (CPO)
A prawn cocktail of exceptionally competent music to enjoy on Easter Sunday
Rachmaninov: Piano Sonata No 1 / Moments Musicaux
A new release of Rachmaninov’s first piano sonata deserves more than five stars
Music’s moral conscience
The violinist Gidon Kremer stands brilliantly apart from the rest of the music world
Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Cello Works and Piano Sonatas
If you want an entry point to Weinberg, this is it
Metamorphosen (Chandos)
John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London reinterpret Metamorphosen chillingly as elegy
Ligeti and Kodaly: Lux Aeterna (OUR Recordings)
The otherworldly and the down-to-earth
Harrison Birtwistle: Chamber works (BIS)
The British composer — still writing at 87 years of age — is an acquired taste
Most Read
The establishment is still living in an immigration fantasy land
It is influential left-wingers, not the broader public, who have deluded themselves on mass migration
American strategy in Iran is wiser than it seems
President Trump’s intervention will leave the world safer than it was
Saint Nicola
Nicola Sturgeon wants sympathy for her husband’s crimes—but after years spent avoiding awkward questions, her latest reinvention may be the hardest sell yet.
On Britain as a capitalist command economy
It is neither neoliberal nor socialist but a secret third thing
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
We must end the tyranny of the Treasury
Short-term and parochial thinking has made us weaker and less safe
When all you have is a Hermer
Why Lord Hermer is a strange fit as Attorney General
Against the censorious right
Miriam Cates is wrong about free speech and anonymity
Scotland’s cold and durable fire
John Swinney is proving that in politics what matters most is simply showing up
The bonfire of British history
Absentee landlords’ neglect allows architectural jewels to be burned to the ground
Iran has been fatally misunderstood
The US and Israel were foolish to imagine that the Iranians would crumble
Canis lupus labor
Europe is a wolf coming up the path to devour the Labour Party
The case for compromise with Cuba
The strategic case for negotiating with Havana
The thin blue line must be thicker
The police are nothing without a presence in communities
A crippling consensus
Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems are singing from the same destructive hymn sheet
Are Reform the new Greens?
As the Green Party loses interest in rural matters, Richard Negus considers the claim that British agriculture and the countryside have a new champion