Lebrecht’s Album of the Week
Stories worth telling
Untold Stories (Hyperion)
A macabre sense of humour
Ligeti, Bartok: String quartets (BIS)
A Soviet revelation
David Oistrakh: The Warner Remastered Edition (58CDs, 3DVDs)
A full-blooded blow-out
Kurt Weill: Symphonies, Seven Deadly Sins (DG)
Lebrecht’s Album of the Year
Not just a great record but an essential one
Not a dull phrase
Ethel Smyth: 2nd sonata &c (Delphian)
Exilic yearnings
Miklos Rozsa: violin concerto (LSO Live)
Impressive yet unmoving
Franz Schmidt: 4 symphonies (Naxos)
Dancing with Beethoven
Beethoven: String Quartets, vol.2 (Chandos)
Hi-energy nutrients
Schoenfield, Vivier, Bartok &c (Accentus Music)
One of the greats
Bathos, fatalism, heartbreak: these are the pillars of a MacColl song
Boris: the PM who could do no wrong
This must be in competition for the most inaccurate work of non-fiction since … well, since Johnson’s last book
Life amid the ruins
Any captured, destroyed city, offers the same problems for the new owners
Fleeing Sally Rooney’s god
Why have critics been ignoring one of the novelist’s most important themes?
The Conservatives must reject Human Quantitative Easing
It has been a disaster for the party and for the nation
We can’t even give them away
Let’s not pretend we have sovereignty over the Chagos Islands
The big picture
A story of modern Britain, a moral tale, of venality, hubris and fraud
Take a bow
This season’s must-have neckwear is a sartorial two-fingered salute to life
Fear and loving
Cricket in the West Indies has not been the same since the loss of Malcolm Marshall
South Africa needs better policies, not just better vibes
Political change must lead to economic change as well
Autumn Reeves
It was a grim budget — but was it a necessary one?
