The Listener
Seductive Debussy and Ravel from the RLPO
Grade: A It’s a cliché that the best Spanish music was written by Frenchmen but it’s mostly true nonetheless, and…
Who let Men Without Hats make a new album?
Grade: D A Montreal band led by a Ukrainian/Canadian called Ivan Doruschuk, with a histrionic baritone, famous solely for having…
Violin concertos from two Broadway legends
Grade: B+ The 20th century, eh? What a lark that was. Vladimir Dukelsky studied in Kiev under Glière and looked…
An album that proves Martinu was one of the great quartet composers
Grade: A Bohuslav Martinu was a patchy composer; worse, he was also a prolific one, meaning that if you dip…
No, Big Thief’s Double Infinity is not the greatest folk album ever
Grade: B- ‘I feel within myself a constant dialogue between my masculinity, my femininity and the part of me that…
Disconcerting but often delightful new Bach transcriptions
Grade: B Everyone loves the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather fewer people love the sound of an unaccompanied organ,…
Irritatingly, Wet Leg’s new album is pretty good
Grade: B+ There’s quite a lot to dislike about Wet Leg, even aside from their stupid name. The entirety of…
A cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria: Bliss: The Composer Conducts reviewed
Grade: A– There’s a classic trajectory for British composers: a five-decade evolution from Angry Young Man to Pillar of the…
A lovely album: Saint Leonard’s The Golden Hour reviewed
Grade: A+ The kids with their synths and hip producers, dragging the 1980s back: I wish they would stop. It…
The repetitiveness made me cry with boredom: Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke’s Tall Tales reviewed
Grade: B+ You are in the wrong hands here for what is a homage to this duo’s favourite electronic music.…
An astonishingly good new album from Black Country, New Road
Grade: A Is that a kind of nod to Oasis in the album title? I can’t think of a band…
Sunny Schubert and iridescent Ravel: album of the week
Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about…
A luminous new recording of The Dream of Gerontius
Grade: A– There’s a species of music-lover who enjoys pointing out that Elgar isn’t played much on the Continent –…
FKA Twigs is the most interesting pop musician we have right now
Grade: A Hell, there’s a lot not to like, or even to be a little suspicious of, with this young…
The real best album of last year
Grade: A+ In a desperate wish to avoid the appellation of a derided genre, this young man from Asheville, North…
