Lebrecht’s Album of the Week
Laid-back Bach
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Württemburg sonatas (ECM)
Stravinsky’s aching quality
Stravinsky, Bartok, Martinu: Works for violin and orchestra (BIS)
Superficial pleasures
A te, Puccini (Signum)
Modernism for the many
Lutoslawski: Concerto for Orchestra, Partita &c (Ondine)
Christmas, irresistibly
Lise Davidsen: Christmas from Norway (Decca)/Miracle of Miracles (Cedille)
A giant dipper of delights
BBC Legends Volume 4 (ICA Classics)
A celebration of redemption
Handel: Israel in Egypt (Avie)
Flickering with fire and ice
Beethoven: 1st piano concerto, &c (DG)
The world’s last measured moments
Joseph Haydn: Symphonies 93-95
A chronicle of gratitude and ambivalence
Mieczyslaw Weinberg: 12th symphony/Dawn (Chandos)
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 martyrdom of Young Bob
On ebbing power of the political influencer
Burying their heads in the ash
The battle against the illicit tobacco market has not been won
How to build a Europe of the peripheries
Resetting Britain’s relations with the EU should not mean being beholden to France and Germany
Scandalous but Scottish
Why Scotland experienced another yellow wave
The resistible centrism of Mark Gatiss
Why a centre-left worldview struggles to understand dissent
The great HR survivors
As the DEI era fades, personnel heads live on as senior CEO consiglieri and hatchet-bearers
The ankle tag and the ballot box
The courts convicted Marine Le Pen, but left her political fate to French voters
Clarifying the fog of the gender wars
Michael Foran’s new book will undoubtedly be celebrated, but is it essential?
A win for academic freedom
The university free speech complaints scheme is (finally) going ahead
Saved from the flames
We should feel fortunate indeed to have the Aeneid
Farewell to a gentle jazz-lover
Scholarship trumps zealotry, particularly when it is veiled by modesty