Lebrecht’s Album of the Week
Honky-tonking around
Yuja Wang: The American Album (DG)
A welter of emotions
Rachmaninov: 2nd symphony (Chandos/Vox)
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
A broken Reed
Who did Steve Reed MP annoy to be sent to face the outrage of the farmers?
Non-euclidean Toryism
The Conservative Party appears somewhat lost
Belle époque on a plate
The Goring offers a level of enchantment seldom found in the environs of Victoria Station
Patostreamers and the decline of public life
A depressing new trend reflects the impoverished state of social existence
Why shouldn’t we discriminate against people’s beliefs?
It is not the same as discriminating on the basis of race or sex
The great British giveaway
The handover of the Chagos Islands reflects a wider lack of realism in UK foreign policy
How the right went wrong
An ill-fated leadership campaign
The assisted suicide debate is not over
But will its supporters try and stop genuine scrutiny?
The menace of camouflage
There’s something dark about the spread of sartorial concealment to civilians
Season’s bleatings
Christmas is almost here, but our MPs are not in the festive spirit
The Democratic Party deserves Donald Trump
Its arrogance and complacency have been exposed
