Lebrecht’s Album of the Week
Sheer sensual pleasure
Fatma Said: Lieder (Warner Classics)
Hahn and Gál: Music out of time
Two composers who stuck to their musical roots as the world turned
Rouvali’s subtle genius
Santtu-Matias Rouvali delivers a masterclass in restraint and resonance in Shostakovich’s 6 and 9
Busoni’s legacy
The best of him is found in the piano concerto
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)
Most Read
The Book of JO’B
James O’Brien’s aggressive incuriosity is becoming ever more embattled as his worldview crumbles
The rise and fall of Nicola Sturgeon
The former SNP leader squandered her talents in a classic tale of hubris
Fear and fury in Belfast
Violence spiralled out of control in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of a shocking crime
The screaming spires
Oxford University must clarify where it stands on academic freedom
Nigel Farage, community leader
The logic of multiculturalism is turning on its architects
QAnon for centrist dads
Peter Chappell’s What If Reform Wins is less a political forecast than a Westminster panic attack in novel form
Peston’s Inbox
Kemi doesn’t give her kids Easter eggs
Today Havering, tomorrow Westminster
The local elections exposed a political class united mainly by its inability to feel embarrassment
Nice Tice
Can Richard Tice clean up Reform’s image? Or a park?
Louis Through
The left-leaning media has lost its moral and institutional authority
Cry sod Harry, England and St George
Why aren’t people proud to be English?
A range of Stratford anecdotes
The Walliams dilemma
Can we get removals right?
Deporting illegal migrants is a lot more difficult than promising to deport them
The problem with optimisation
Feeling maximally healthy and productive is not the point of life
To defeat populism, don’t start here
Views that would be charming in their naivety, were they not so contradictory or facile
Labour’s toxic medicine
The more they treat the symptoms of decline, the worse things get