Music
Wartime hallelujah
Creativity amid conflict
Wagner rides again
A return to enchanted tradition in Siegfried at Longborough Festival Opera
The original, best and shortest English opera
John Blow, Venus and Adonis; Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas (HGO)
Henryk Mikolai Gorecki: Piano pieces (Accord)
A furious, unfiltered revelation of the experimental heart of a familiar composer
Pomp and circumstance
A Venetian Coronation, The Gabrieli Consort, St John’s Smith Square
The last weird decade
We have lost the oddness of the 1990s
Doing the Strand
The glorious heyday of Roxy Music, when just to be a fan of a band that sounded like no other was like being in an exclusive club
Musical scores
Great passages of play evoke great music
Before and after gould
Bach’s Goldberg Variations have a rich history that far transcend its modern association with Glenn Gould
The sound of love
Robert Schumann expresses the intense passion and despair of true love better than any other composer
Cognition porn and discursive dehumanisation
Cultural and political discourse can follow the reductive yet seductive logic of pornography
Long story short
Movie length seems to have become a way for directors to tell us what serious people they are
Weak, flawed, limited; an opportunity missed
Sanghera really should have devoted more attention to the pre-Western history in Empireworld
Playing the victim
A new book satirises the bizarre dynamics of social justice activism
The spectre of the past
The “Great English Ghost Story” offers a form of comfort and is rooted in the ache of nostalgia for a more elegant era
The City’s lights are dimming
The Square Mile is increasingly at risk of becoming an irrelevance
Saving my own bacon
Only the particularly pig-headed will stick it out in the pork farming business
Venice’s tortuous tourist tax
How much public money has been wasted on a scheme which will be quietly retired?
What are our cathedrals for?
Changes to the management of cathedrals have obscured the very point of their existence
Two-tier policing?
If the Government caves in on its buffer zone guidance, it will be mandating two-tier policing
Giving noticing a bad name
Observing factual differences is not the same as leaping to conclusions
