Lebrecht’s Album of the Week
Talent and temptation
William Walton: Two symphonies
Schubert à la mould
Prize-winning pianism curdles into self-regard
Small chips off an old block
Soulima Stravinsky (Nimbus)
Baroque in a bad way
Vikingur Olafsson: Opus 109 (DG)
The start of something new
Kurt Weill: Love Life (Capriccio)
Transcending misery
Galina Ustvolskaya: Symphonies 1-5 (BIS)
Prodigiously original
Alkan: Early works (Piano Classics)
Unjustly overlooked but somewhat undercooked
Elsa Barraine: 2 symphonies &c.(CPO)
The sweet sounds of catastrophe
Shostakovich/Britten: Cello works (Decca)
A much-misunderstood composer
The Cosmos of Paul Ben-Haim (CPO)
Most Read
Tame Impala fails to impress
unconquered by a
taste of Crusader food
Gary Stevenson is wrong about wealth taxes
The popular economist is irritating, but more importantly he is mistaken
Why they hated Ann Widdecombe
Fair-minded people could agree or disagree with her opinions. Left-wing bigots hated her for not abandoning them
What is wrong now was wrong before
Julia Gillard should not pretend that the “unintended consequences” of the gender debate were unknowable
Ethnic minorities are abandoning Labour
It is not just Muslim voters who have been abandoning the Labour Party
The underworld on the high street
Beneath the façade of everyday commerce, organised crime has quietly captured British high streets
The injustice of early releases
The government is failing victims for the sake of political convenience
Operatic satire is a Shaw thing
The old Art has an armoury of skunk-like defence mechanisms to keep the unwashed at bay
The art of statesmanship
An exhibition at the Wallace Collection shows how Britain’s greatest wartime leader found solace and satisfaction in painting
It is time to cut pensions
The economic burden on younger people is unsustainable
The last ponies on the moor
Dartmoor Ponies are facing an extinction event, thanks to a government Quango
Welcome to the low-trust economy
The multi-billion pound cost of Britain’s shoplifting surge
We must end the tyranny of the Treasury
Short-term and parochial thinking has made us weaker and less safe
The SNP is in a Peter Murrell muddle
The Peter Murrell case has exposed the rot at the heart of the SNP’s political culture
The knife and the bone
After war and repression, Iranian dissidents believe the regime’s reckoning is near — but Tehran’s influence reaches far beyond its borders
Why does Labour hate our pubs?
The government has to stop taxing the hearts of our communities out of business