Lebrecht’s Album of the Week
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
Two lost composers
Feinberg / Winterberg: The lost works (Melism)
Ravel, Dutilleux, Debussy: Quart de nuit (Deux-Elles)
Norman Lebrecht is left wanting more Dutilleux
Alexander Zemlinsky: The Mermaid (Pentatone)
Norman Lebrecht breaks a rule in his review of The Mermaid
An essential record
Norman Lebrecht reviews Shostakovich: Violin concertos 1&2, performed by Alina Ibragimova and the State Symphony Orchestra of Russia
The vital few
A new book explores the importance, as well as the dangers, of risk
Britain isn’t the Balkans
The UK is not, despite heated rhetoric, on the brink of sectarian violence. But it is heading in the wrong direction
Hoop dreams
Football turned out to be a poor way of shirking parental duties
Imagine there’s no Gove
Who’s in the room matters, and there were some which would have been better off without Michael Gove
“Trope” is not a synonym of “lie”
You cannot dismiss an argument by calling it a trope
The Sturgeon delusion
How the former SNP leader inspired hope and then squandered it
Is this just fantasy?
Sir Brian May is wrong: farmers do care
We should have the freedom to criticise Islam
Religious freedom entails the right to criticise a belief system as well as to adhere to it
The crisis at Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre
Serious as it is, it is no anomaly
How the West fell out of love with mass migration
Restrictionist opinion is breaking through the establishment cordon sanitaire
Waugh at war
Self-sacrifice, tradition and service seem to have been cast aside by today’s society
