Lebrecht’s Album of the Week
Too formal for the pub
Mr Händel im pub: Baroque meets folk (Arcantus)
Unenticing overtures
Rautavaara: 3rd piano concerto (Bis); Overtures from Finland (Chandos)
Contemplating infinity
Franz Liszt: Transcendental Etudes (Steinway)
Encompassing a life
RIP Kaija Saariaho
Delicate decadence
A tantalising selection of songs
New work, sounding old
A disappointing new collection
An unreviewable album
The music is beautiful; the context is not
No more than curiosities
Bruno Walter: String quartet, piano quintet (CPO)
An epochal set
Nielsen: The Symphonies (DG)
Pain, poise and passion
Erich Wolfgang Korngold: String quartets 1-3 (Naxos)
A bleak midwinter
For fans watching QPR struggle for the past two decades, it feels like the club is cursed
Resist Labour’s managerial revolution
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are grimly committed to expanding the state and entrenching bureaucracy
The wrongs of Proudman
Criticism does not amount to discrimination or abuse
The problem with Rachel Reeves’s pension pretensions
Bigger funds are not the key to effective investments
Splashing the cash
On the complex relationship between art and money
Doublespeak about assisted suicide
The campaign for assisted suicide is distinctly Orwellian
How the right went wrong
An ill-fated leadership campaign
Gothic staging
The Turn of the Screw, Coliseum
Worthy instrument
York Bowen, Willam Walton: Viola concertos (SWR Music)
When the music stopped
A reflection on the inexorable decline of arts education and the rise of knee-jerk politics and managerialism
Impressive yet unmoving
Franz Schmidt: 4 symphonies (Naxos)
