The Critics

And the band played on…

The appointment of a chief conductor little affects the general performance of an orchestra

Hip-hop with a Weimar vibe

Bertolt Brecht’s didacticism puts off a lot of people who are sympathetic to a marxist world view

Odes to joy

Robert Thicknesse on Rossini’s extraordinary de-cluttering of the musical atmosphere

Back to the wall

Despite the fact East Germany has disappeared, it continues to live on in this outstanding trilogy

Crypto-art for cryptomillions

Digital art: the millennial trend

Foreign frivolity

Robert Thicknesse on how the idea that foreign poetry was better than local soon became established dogma

Blurred history

Britpop has a bad reputation for stolid, white-boy basicness now, but it’s not a reputation Parklife deserves

Where there’s a Will…

If plum roles started being handed out on the random basis of “artistic merit”, anarchy would surely reign…

Finn noir

A Bergmanesque miasma of gloom hangs over every episode in this new Scandinavian thriller

Dear and hateful

Christopher Silvester shows how Konchalovsky has one of the strangest careers in world cinema