Album Review
A welter of emotions
Rachmaninov: 2nd symphony (Chandos/Vox)
Unveiled enigmas
Shostakovich: Works unveiled (BIS)
Beethoven’s piano maker
Album of the Week: Nannette Streicher’s Fortepiano (Gramola)
Instruments of shock and awe
Jean Sibelius/Arne Nordheim; The Tempest (Naxos/LAWO)
Englishness with an aftertaste
The pleasures of cowpats
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
Lucia di Lammermoor, Royal Opera House
It’s an amazing paradox that something as tawdry as opera can produce such a pure expression of what it is to be human
Let’s change the cultural meaning of the penis
Our genitals do not entitle us to anything
Best bets for Cheltenham
My racing tips for Cheltenham
The reality of tobacco control
To have a law does not mean that it will be respected
The BBC feeds us bad science
We can’t even trust the Beeb to tell us about the basic facts of motherhood
The building that inspired Orwell
Was there an appetite at the time for monumental buildings, equivalent to those in Moscow?
The W-word
The idea that the sex of a person is simply a matter of choice is a giant ideological lie
The royals needs better PR
We have seen too many royal disasters
The Age of Twee
Line up and clap for the NHS, wankpuffin
Dylan Mulvaney did not share our girlhood
His bizarre parody of the female experience is grossly offensive
The broad influence of Aquinas
His influence has been felt in economics as well as philosophy and religion
