Music Reviews
Pomp and circumstance
A Venetian Coronation, The Gabrieli Consort, St John’s Smith Square
Sibelius: 7 symphonies and Tapiola (Decca)
A fresh, ambitious and daring approach to the familiar Finn
Smoke Signals
How a song can drift across a life
Too darn hot
Carmen still shocks and seduces
Joyce DiDonato: Eden (Erato); Asmik Grigorian: Rachmaninov (Alpha)
This is singing as mildly polemical conversation, from her to us
Brahms: Clarinet sonatas (BIS), French clarinet music (Delphian)
Three sonatas by Brahms? The clarinet adaptation, to no surprise, doesn’t work
Nikolai Kapustin, Alfred Schnittke: Cello Concertos (Capriccio)
I can imagine Kapustin in the background, smiling at his piano, during this breath-taking revival
Christopher Rouse: 5th symphony (Naxos)
What Rouse wrote was an intimate series of love letters to the orchestra
Ravel, Dutilleux, Debussy: Quart de nuit (Deux-Elles)
Norman Lebrecht is left wanting more Dutilleux
AI is a terrible poet
It has no sense for true meaning and beauty in language
Labour has a conspiracy problem
Dawn Butler MP should reevaluate her eccentric ideas
Twitter monetisation was a mistake
It has diminished rather than enhanced creativity
The city and its uncertain plot
Despite fascinating thematic material to work with, Murakami still makes it ploddingly dull
Assisted dying and the risk of premature surrender
We should be very wary of the circumvention of true palliative care
Procedural Man
The Process is good, the Process is correct, no matter what, trust the Process
The problem with EDI
Equality, diversity and inclusion policies are constraining free thought and dividing people
Office politics
There’s the joker, the slacker, and the bloke who just got fired
The right-on, left-wing oppressors
A flaw in the design of academic studies makes the Left appear less authoritarian than the Right
Choosing enemies wisely
China manifestly wishes to avenge her past humiliation at Western hands
“Bold vision”
An action or choice can perfectly well be bold without being good
