Album Review
Well-behaved Beethoven
Beethoven: Triple concerto and British folksongs (Decca)
Polish strings
Grazyna Bacewicz: Symphonies 3 &4; Concerto for string orchestra (both on Chandos)
Having a bad Bey
If you’re going to jettison the essence of the song, why even bother?
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)
The problem with Nigel Farage
The maverick Reform leader might be entertaining, but he is also unreliable
Sue her
A mad week of misgendering, arson, and Wetherspoons coming out
The real St George’s Day
The week in fragile people and fragile porcelain
The Conservatives deserve credit on sex and gender
They were slow to respond to institutional capture — but they did respond
Two sides of the weird frontier
The archly neutral now stands on the margins, looking out at a society of fear and outrage
J.K. Rowling does it again
Why does one woman’s opinion cause so much outrage?
A question of selection
The Sensible Centrists have made a flawed case against party members choosing leaders
Ballots or bullets in New Caledonia
Democracy is at stake as violence scars the French territory
Anger and intuition
Mieczyslaw Weinberg: String quartets 6, 13, 15 (Chandos)
En rama drama
Spanish wine helps one escape the misery and damp of Britain
Talk of the town
On the strangeness and variety of urban development
