Classical Music
Allan Pettersson: Barefoot songs (BIS)
Sweden scorned the composer who could have been its greatest
Before and after gould
Bach’s Goldberg Variations have a rich history that far transcend its modern association with Glenn Gould
The sound of love
Robert Schumann expresses the intense passion and despair of true love better than any other composer
Sibelius: 7 symphonies and Tapiola (Decca)
A fresh, ambitious and daring approach to the familiar Finn
Sounds and sweet airs
Classical music is flourishing in Britain — though if you listened to our cultural elite you’d never know it
Bring on the big beasts
Music needs heavyweight champions to stand up for truth and excellence
Gustav Mahler: 4th symphony (Pentatone)
A new recording of Mahler’s smallest symphony is “indispensable” to connoisseurs of his music
British piano concertos (Lyrita); British music for strings #3 (CPO)
A prawn cocktail of exceptionally competent music to enjoy on Easter Sunday
Such sweet sorrow
Lent is an ideal time to take pleasure in a gentle, contemplative and very English strand of musical melancholia
Rachmaninov: Piano Sonata No 1 / Moments Musicaux
A new release of Rachmaninov’s first piano sonata deserves more than five stars
Folly, fantasy and Britain’s defence crisis
Britain has spent scarce resources in support of the fantasy of “Global Britain”
England is not yet lost
Where else would you rather be from?
Writing lives
The life story of the biography, from Victorian glorification to Bloomsbury boldness to contemporary obliquity
Graduation blues
On the sad decline of the British university
You reap what you sow
Poor Daniel Zeichner was left to face the outrage that the Budget had caused
Can Macron survive?
France appears to be becoming ungovernable
The predictability of subverting expectations
What to expect when you’re expecting your expectations to be subverted
Farewell to Larry Siedentop
The great political philosopher, Oxford don, and sage defender of Western liberalism
Confessions of a Melbourne Bus-Fare Evader
I am become bus, destroyer of bourgeois class consciousness
A matter of life and death
It is not the job of judges to tell someone that they are wrong for believing in life
Tory Utopias
1940s Conservatism was seething with creativity and optimism
