albums
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…
Has Taylor Swift been reading The Spectator?
The Last Dinner Party received quite the critical backlash when they arrived amid much fanfare in 2023. Posh, precocious and…
The mind-bendingly creative works of Louis Couperin
The French lutenist Charles Fleury, Sieur de Blancrocher, is one of those unfortunate historical figures who are chiefly remembered because…
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…
‘Modern pop makes me want to kill myself’: Neil Hannon interviewed
Search for a successor to Tom Lehrer, and you’ll be hard pressed to find any decent candidates. One of the …
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,…
Why I don’t get the blues
The Louisiana bluesman Buddy Guy is releasing a new album this week. It is called Ain’t Done With The Blues…
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…
No amount of discourse will make a good pop song into a great one
There is no higher calling than making great pop music, and no mechanism by which such an achievement can be…
Alfred Brendel was peerless – but he wasn’t universally loved
In middle age Alfred Brendel looked disconcertingly like Eric Morecambe – but, unlike the comedian in his legendary encounter with…
Compelling: Little Simz’s Lotus reviewed
It is not uncommon for (predominantly male) music critics to invert the ‘great man/great woman’ dictum in order to suggest…
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.…
The disturbing ambient music of William Tyler
One could argue that all musical forms are essentially incomplete until the listener joins the party, but ambient music seems…
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…
Silly, moving and imaginative: Steven Wilson’s The Overview reviewed
Progressive rock never died. Whenever some grizzled punk soldier next appears on a BBC4 documentary relaying their version of that…
How to write a piano concerto
My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic:…
