Forget the sneering of Benjamin Britten, for whom Brahms’s music was “ugly and foul”, the German composer and pianist was a virtuoso talent whose best works burn with volcanic passion and seriousness of purpose

The BBC at its best on Shakespeare, and remembering Barry Humphries.

Norman Lebrecht re-examines the life and legacy of Stravinsky.

Limitless choice and a rattle of regret

Erich Wolfgang Korngold: String quartets 1-3 (Naxos)

The clavichord makes up for a lack of grandeur with extraordinary expressiveness

These four composers deserve to be remembered without exaggeration in service of social revanchism

Greatness does not always declare itself in torrents of Slavic emotion or Germanic intellectualism

Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Songs (DG)