Lebrecht’s Album of the Week
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
Not so easy listening
Janacek, Brahms, Bartok: Violin sonatas (Alpha-Classics/Outhere)
Album of the year
Rich pickings in dark times
An excess of Fauré
Gabriel Fauré: Violin concerto (Naxos), Complete piano works (Calliope)
We need more have-yachts
The tragedy of the Bayesian highlights a wider issue about our lack of ambition
Blogosphere bubble
Reviving a simple English classic: bubble and squeak
Murders for October
Tales from the gothic to the macabre
Tawdry tales
The Tales of Hoffmann, Royal Opera House
The authorities are inept sheriffs of social media
Politicians, the police and the judiciary should stop trying to control a landscape they do not understand
Could there be a Reform revolution?
Reform’s Welsh Conference brimmed with optimism — but can that be translated into success?
Prom-lematic
Landlords, Lammy, “Land of Hope and Glory” and other questionable phenomena
What does it mean to be Christian?
We are in danger of reducing faith to the shallow depths of personality and politics
One of the greats
Bathos, fatalism, heartbreak: these are the pillars of a MacColl song
The tragedy of Radio 3
The centenary “celebration” of the BBC Singers summed up everything that has gone wrong
