Lebrecht’s Album of the Week
Unveiled enigmas
Shostakovich: Works unveiled (BIS)
Instruments of shock and awe
Jean Sibelius/Arne Nordheim; The Tempest (Naxos/LAWO)
Englishness with an aftertaste
The pleasures of cowpats
No ordinary musicologist
Krzysztof Meyer, Dmitri Shostakovich: Cello-piano sonatas (Kaleidos)
An enemy of the best
Nothing routine, showy or ill-considered
Outwards and inwards
Drawing the ear into every era of western music
A guaranteed crowd pleaser
Let the brass section blow cobwebbed memories to kingdom come
Rage captured to perfection
Chamber symphonies were a neglected genre revived during the Covid shutdowns
Jiving in the ruins
This dazzling album features young composers in hyperinflationary Berlin
The missing dimension
Warning: contains passages of symphonic transcendence
Legal laughs
Legal “humour” is seldom more than mildly amusing
Live not by kayfabe
The dark side of professional wrestling is the dark side of institutional life
Teaching leftists about tax
Sometimes, an argument about economic policy is like an oil spill
The erotic art book banned by a pope
A rich tale of great artists, pornography and the papacy has made I Modi one of the most fabled of all books
A decade of economic disaster
Only one verdict is possible: Conservative rule has been a comprehensive failure
Tragedy of the common spaces
It is sadly in keeping with the modern British mindset to prefer something good not to be done
Grizelda Buncome
Peripatetic creative writing tutor
The slick glide through the institutions
When values are outsourced to third-party organisations, everybody suffers
Let’s at least agree rape is wrong
Fundamental feminist theories are under attack from within feminism itself
Has Israel walked into a forever war?
A brutal conflict seems unlikely to be winnable any time soon
The truth about sex
No amount of clever-clever language games can obscure basic biological facts
