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
Who is a Ukrainian musician?
Music and ethnicity are both more complex than nationalism allows
Schulhoff, Popov: String quartets (QBT)
A Baedeker tour of Europe’s miseries, amidst the outrage in Ukraine
Joyce DiDonato: Eden (Erato); Asmik Grigorian: Rachmaninov (Alpha)
This is singing as mildly polemical conversation, from her to us
The concert hall of the future
A performance space without walls or limits
Grazyna Bacewicz: Piano works (Ondine)
One would never imagine Stalinist oppression was raging all around her
Most Read
How religion shapes football fandom
The meaning of football is intertwined with the meaning of faith
Labour’s mercurial kingmaker
The eventful career of Josh Simons, the man who gave up his seat for Andy Burnham
In defence of Lara Bird
There is nothing weird or dishonest about having a dual existence
Why has Keir Starmer been so unpopular?
He was the perfect embodiment of a failing system
The hitch with the Hitch
How Christopher Hitchens brought me back to Christ
The trans war on reality
Trans activists loudly trumpet a false mythology
of victimhood. In fact, trans people are more
likely to kill than be killed,
Climate alarmism must not be unquestionable
We have succumbed to herd-like thinking over renewable energy
The third man
Bridget Phillipson’s “Code of Practice” has clarified nothing on sex and gender
A high-speed tour of European History
Europe: A New
History by Roderick Beaton
Zurbarán on Freud’s couch
An acclaimed new exhibition is full of overwrought symbolism and compositional failures
Operatic satire is a Shaw thing
The old Art has an armoury of skunk-like defence mechanisms to keep the unwashed at bay
Hurty words
Robust debate is to be celebrated, not condemned
Babies need women
Leaving children with only men who are not their parents is foolish and dangerous
The EU is getting worse
Ursula von der Leyen’s left-wing managerial agenda is failing
Critical briefing: energy price shocks
The shocks from the Iran War are yet to be felt, but are sure to be powerful
The right does not need religion
We should not mourn the end of the Quiet Revival