Album Review
Elgar’s excellence
Elgar: Symphonies (Halle/Oehms)
Musical no man’s lands
Two violin concertos fail to inspire
Playfulness and tedium
Stravinsky, Petrushka; Debussy, Jeux and Prelude (Decca)
A talented pianist and a battered piano
Bezhod Abduraimov: Shadows of my ancestors (Alpha-Classics)
What became of Tchaikovsky?
Tchaikovsky: 5th symphony etc (ICA Classics)
Essential all-embracing warmth
Gidon Kremer: Songs of Fate (ECM)
The light and the insubstantial
Poulenc and others: Chamber music (Calliope/DG)
Laid-back Bach
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Württemburg sonatas (ECM)
Rozsa’s regret
Miklos Rozsa: Orchestral works (Capriccio)
Stravinsky’s aching quality
Stravinsky, Bartok, Martinu: Works for violin and orchestra (BIS)
Clerical error
Clergy should be in the business of saving souls, not stamping passports
Ukraine cannot avoid partition
Ukraine must not capitulate and demilitarise, but de-facto partition is now an inevitability
Against the relegation of Record Review
Why is Radio 3 mistreating one of its greatest assets?
Their transition too (w/ Emma B)
Children are not secondary characters in their parents’ story
The crisis in the universities
A Critic panel brought light as well as heat to the troubled question of higher education
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
The public health fanatics have a new enemy in their sights
The fallacy of soft power
The world runs on cold national self interest, not cultural capital
WW3 and the end of history
The age of world wars is past, the age of global civil war has come
Against stakeholderism
How ideas like “citizens’ assemblies” threaten democracy and effective policy-making
The misanthropic history man
Yuval Noah Harari has become an intellectual superstar, but his predictions have become wilder and sillier
How capitalism gave women leisure
Feminist anti-capitalists are spinning delusions about economic history
