Music Reviews
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
The slick glide through the institutions
When values are outsourced to third-party organisations, everybody suffers
The right must learn from modern art
Marcel Duchamp’s rule-breaking provides real lessons for the right
Were lockdowns ethical?
Questionable benefits were emphasised above obvious and dramatic harms
Saving my own bacon
Only the particularly pig-headed will stick it out in the pork farming business
When classicists attack classics
Sanskrit isn’t the only ancient language to be affected by academic imperialism
He’ll never let the old flag fall
Lee Anderson will never stand for insult, especially the insult of never being invited round for dinner
Scratches in the stonework of history
A new history of graffiti and rebellion is less light and bawdy than one may have expected
The worm (re)turns
Dune: Part Two is in cinemas — and it’s more of the glorious same
Stopping the devolution ratchet
More devolution will not solve the worst consequences of devolution
In praise of centibillionaires
When people are free to make a lot of money from new businesses, everybody wins
Killing the golden goose
International student numbers must be capped, and candidates held to the same academic standards
